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Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

This is a great primer. I used to work in this field, but not as a colour scientist.

> So why do we have so many different color spaces?

I think there was a missing piece here. Different representations of colour are useful for different things. I'm not going to give any secrets away but...if your trade involves finding out how close one colour is to another, then something that represents colours as points in space could make the maths easier. Then if you wanted to know if one colour was brighter than another, then something that represents a colour with a separate 'brightness factor' would make that trivial.

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as post production guy living outside US/EU, a decade or so ago i was surprised that colorimeter was supposed to be regularly calibrated by another, more expensive, device.

I think that depends on what you mean by 'supposed to'. I don't recall this being suggested for normal applications, and if you have a very tight specification then a colorimeter may not be the correct instrument in the first place. As I said above, I'm not a colour scientist, but I do know something about what was done in practice in certain industries.

i'm in post-production so lots of color spaces & monitorings. colorimeters drifted with age/usage, so annual check for the first two years or so is good enough but then gradually afterwards it's good practice to calibrate more frequent, and more likely there's a small fee for that. spectrometers (or spectroradiometer can't be sure) are still insanely expensive.

We were big fans of Marti’s LCMS.

I can't remember the technical reason we didn't use it...we mostly rolled our own. We were very lucky to have someone who knew how!

IIRC the licensing was restrictive for commercial use but it's been a long time. I think we ended up throwing him a few grand for a different license, an option I'd never considered before and one that's stuck with me.

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