Computer colors aren’t consistent

Color theory has been extremely well researched for quite a long time. If you are not familiar, I would suggest reading up on the CIE 1931 color space [1].

Some of the confusion in the article relates to terminology. >When we say “yellow” we typically mean a pure monochromatic light with a wavelength of about 570nm. This is not actually what most people mean. Colors like "yellow" usually mean the tristimulus values that produce the visible color yellow. This is a totally different concept than a single-wavelength light source. This becomes more important for colors like "purple".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space

Ideally, each person should probably characterize their display by eye (instead of a hardware device; and for this to work properly we’d need a better user interface than the existing ones), separately for each context it will be looked at in (i.e. a laptop would need several profiles for various lighting conditions).

But we can actually get pretty good results for most people, most of the time, by sticking to industry standards. If a display can get the chromaticity of its primaries close to the sRGB spec and bright enough for the context, and content authors design for sRGB, then most people (minus the substantial percentage who have color vision deficiencies) will see something reasonably close to what the content author intended.

If the display doesn’t match the spec (like the iPad mini retina display which trades color fidelity for power efficiency), then it would be nice if software would compensate a bit. Unfortunately, mobile operating systems and software don’t ever bother with color management, because it was too computationally expensive for the first 2 generations of iPhones. It’s sad that this is still true for iOS, considering how Apple pioneered color management software in the 90s.

For folks with color vision deficiencies, we could probably do better than current displays, but there are several types of color vision deficiencies so it’s going to be pretty hard to satisfy everyone.

Good morning… another one who woke up… finally. Anyone who was active in computer graphics in the past century knows about this. This is why there are contact color spaces like CIE XYZ or CIE Lab. Yet for some reason we're still using desktop compositors that work in imprecise and small gamut sRGB instead of a contact color space.

This is why CRT monitors remained popular for as long as they did even with the advent of LCD technology; they tend to be more accurate color-wise, so graphic designers would prefer them.

I spent a lot of time working on color matching back in the early 90s when the first cheap Macs large screens came out - back thyen we thought some simple transform could make it all the same - one thing we eventually realised was that there's only so much you can do here - there are no standard human eyes, they vary as much as screens (for example 10% of the male poulation is red-green colorblind)

that's why people who work with graphics use a calibrator.