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Comment by skosch | Hacker News Reader

More than you ever wanted to know, in one well-illustrated blog post: http://jamie-wong.com/post/color/

That's awesome. It makes me think, though, that we could do a lot better than RGB given accurate values for actual human cone sensitivity and better subpixel colors. We should be able to get a digital gamut that fully spans the visible spectrum.

Yes we could get much better results with more primaries in our displays. It would take some fancier digital signal processing, and more importantly would only be especially useful for images designed with the wider gamut in mind (or potentially even multispectral images), but is possible using current technology, and probably not impossibly expensive.

Personally I would love to see displays made grids of hexagonal pixels, and maybe 7 primaries. Since almost every image that goes to displays today already needs to be rescaled at runtime, the processing shouldn’t need to be impossibly much more expensive than current square-grid resampling.

I would also love to see digital camera sensors with more primaries in a better pixel arrangement.

7 seems like overkill, but ok. :D Is that helpful for being able to display the full gamut of visible color more than 4 primaries, or even just 3 that are closer aligned to our eyes?

I picked 7 because it works nicely with hexagonal pixels. :-)

But the primaries can be relatively close together in color. It’s fine if we have e.g. 2 reds, 2 blues, and 3 greens instead of 1 of each.

Or for an LCD, some of them could be broader-spectrum primaries which were brighter but less colorful, while others could be more intense narrow-spectrum primaries. This would make the display more color accurate for various observers (more robust against “observer metamerism”), and would make the display overall brighter for the same intensity of backlight.

Or I dunno.. I’m not an expert in display technology, I’m sure the engineers could come up with many ideas.

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