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Comment by twelvechairs | Hacker News Reader

I have the feeling that most HN readers have their colour perceptions affected far more by the limited spectrum of an RGB LCD than anything else.

For instance - I challenge anyone reading this to tell me what colours are not represented well on their screen. The spectrum is wide and 3 channels is really 'tolerable' rather than 'good' coverage. In reality there is a vast range of violets, reds and green-yellow-orange in the world that are represented as muddy-blurs of other colours rather than themselves on screen...

Nobody seems to make the same fuss over quality of colour and the visual spectrum on computers as say, audiophiles do about miniscule differences in what they hear. I'm not quite sure why this is.

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This is true, but irrelevant. The human visual system adapts to reconstruct what it believes a surface color is, based on the colors of the overall image. Classic example:

http://content.screencast.com/users/shawnpresser/folders/Jin...

A and B are exactly the same RGB color, even though they appear completely different.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9Sen1HTu5o

So in truth, yes, the LCD spectrum is limited, but you can still achieve an overall "look and feel" regardless of the smaller gamut. Our perception of any specific color is dominated by other colors around it in the scene.

Thats a slightly separate point. Your mind sees colour in many different ways. One of these (at a higher-level) is as shapes and relative-tones as you describe. Other parts of the brain and the body work at a much lower-level however, which is why (for instance) people innately enjoy natural-sunshine and get depressed when sitting inside under lightbulbs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_affective_disorder is one, well researched side of this).

That's probably more Vitamin D differences than colour.

Vitamin D basically IS presence of/lack of colour - because it is only produced when certain wavelengths of light ('colours') are present. As well as vitamin D there are also many other chemicals in the body which need certain wavelengths of light to be produced. See for instance web.mit.edu/dick/www/pdf/286.pdf (an 1980s but reasonable article not written by quacks)

That's an interesting thought and cheers for the link. I guess I tend to think of colours as only within the visual spectrum, and my understanding was that the chemical reactions were from UV and above, but I can see now that's kind of arbitrary thinking.

I agree with nopassrecover. Could you please provide a citation to research that demonstrates that we innately get depressed when not exposed to sunlight because we can't enjoy color differences as much? That seems to be a pretty audacious statement, and I've never heard it before.

The "innately get depressed when not exposed to sunlight" I've read many times, and has been researched a lot, plenty of papers about.

The "because we can't enjoy color differences as much" part, not so much, if ever.

To respond a little - I was trying to use "innately get depressed when not exposed to sunlight" as an example of something well researched showing that light affects people physically in ways that are not just 'seeing shape and contrast' (which sillysaurus' post seemed to be stating was the be-all and end-all of colour and vision).

Its a slightly different point to 'enjoying colour differences', which of course we do. Compare a sunset in real life (even behind a window) with that in a photo - for instance....

>To respond a little - I was trying to use "innately get depressed when not exposed to sunlight" as an example of something well researched showing that light affects people physically in ways that are not just 'seeing shape and contrast'

It could not be light as such though. It could be warmth from the sun that makes people depressed when not exposed to sunlight, or vitamin deficiency (some vitamins need sunlight to be usable).

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