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Comment by blake8086 | Hacker News Reader

I have these, they work for me. They make a really big difference in distinguishing things like red/green traffic lights, or vegetation on top of red brick. They also just make all of nature look a lot nicer.

If you have any questions about them, I would be glad to answer.

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What sort of color blindness do you have? And is what you see qualitatively different, like is there a new 'feel' to the color being made apparent? Or is it more like the tiny differences you were always aware of are more intense?

Glad they work for you, by the way. Tough problem to solve.

I have red-green deficiency, so red and green both seem like they have a lot of white in them (I found out). For instance, green traffic lights actually look white-green to me without the glasses, and same for red. The sunglasses make them look like a pure, brilliant green or red with no white added.

I would describe it as a pretty big difference, it's not tiny, it's really obvious, and whenever I forget my sunglasses or can't wear them for whatever reason, the outdoors look really muted.

They won't work if you have complete color blindness, because there's no red-green distinguishing information to work off of.

Right, gotcha. Excellent, I may have to keep these in mind for a few friends.

Do they have to be modified or customized in any way for you depending on sensitivity or whatnot? I suppose I could look it up but your situation may have differed.

I don't think there are any options, I just got "large" "black" sunglasses in one of the few frames they offer.

Looking at the diagrams [1], I see that it works by creating 3 pass-bands. I understand how it would work for natural light. But how well does it work for you with CRT/LCD monitors that simulate the color gamut using just the three primary colors? Do these glasses help you with monitors too? How well do you discern color on monitors with/without these glasses?

[1] http://enchroma.com/technology/how-it-works/

It doesn't seem to do anything to monitors (I just re-tested). I'm guessing because a monitor only really shows me three colors, there's no problem.

The glasses don't seem to help with distinguishing colors on monitors.

I can discern color on monitors just fine, I'm only partly deficient, not completely color-blind.

Thanks for the info. I understand that you're only partially deficient. I was merely testing a hypothesis of mine, that RGB-based image sources should not show an improvement for you.

The corollary to the above would be that CMYK-based sources should perform worse. So do color pictures in magazines, and other print material appear particularly washed out to you, and rather darker when you wear these glasses? I am not sure about color prints from film cameras.

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