What is the “Color Gamut” of a Fireworks Show?

Posted on July 2, 2018 by Allison Harn

Editor’s Note: If you read this blog, there’s a decent chance that at some point you’ve gazed up at the impressive spectacle of a July 4th fireworks show and wondered to yourself, “what color gamut, if any, could possibly express all of these deeply saturated, emissive colors??” This week, we’ve got the answers with a timely piece on the chemistry and color of fireworks from guest blogger Allison Harn. Please do not try any of this at home!

Updated 7/6/18 to correct a typo in the chemical compound chart. Hat tip to Matt B. for catching the error!

Image credit: Fireworks via Flickr user ·tic∙ under CC License

If You Are Someone Who Doesn’t Like Fighting After-Show Traffic, Viewing Firework Displays On Tv Is About To Get Better

Ever noticed how disappointing it is to watch fireworks on your home TV compared being out experiencing a live show? If you’re a true fireworks enthusiast, nothing can replace that brilliant burst of color in the sky, followed by a brief moment of anticipation before sound finally catches up to light and the loud THUMP pounds through your chest.

The perfect combination of sound and color are what makes fireworks shows memorable. While I can’t shed light on how sound systems compare to the real deal, I do have insight on why fireworks colors fail you so horribly on current TV’s.

First, A Bit Of Background Chemistry

If you ever took an introductory chemistry course, you might remember performing flame tests on solutions. Electrons get excited by energy from the flames and when they lose that energy, they emit light at specific wavelengths. Each element has its own unique colors that are produced (copper ions emit blue-green; lithium ions emit crimson red). Fireworks compositions work similarly, though it’s a little more complex.

In the pyrotechnics world, the materials that produce colors are collectively called “stars”. The composition of stars varies greatly; it seems like there are more recipes out there for creating a particular color of star as there are for your favorite type of cookie. In the end though, they mostly look the same: black or grey pellets shaped into small cylinders or spheres.

The magic happens when these are ignited. The ingredients combine together at high energies to produce compounds that emit visible light. There are many different color emitters, but the most intense colors come off of the stars that are able to produce Strontium Monochloride (SrCl) for red, Barium Monochloride (BaCl) for green, Copper(I) Chloride (CuCl) for blue, and Calcium Monochloride (CaCl) for orange. These are unstable compounds that are formed in the high temperatures during the chemical reaction.The most remarkable part about this though is that the wavelengths that these compounds emit cannot be displayed by your TV. Current HD TV’s capture only a small part of what the human eye can see. The colors listed above fall almost completely outside the current HD broadcast color space and two of them are beyond even the newer UltraHD TV color space.

“Color Gamut” of a fireworks show, plotted in CIE 1976 (u’v’) with comparison to HDTV and BT.2020 color gamuts.

Colors that lie outside the HD TV region in the above chart cannot be accurately displayed by an HD set. These TVs distort what you see by remapping deeply saturated colors so that they fall within the display’s limited color gamut (editor’s note: we detailed how color spaces work in “Color Space Confusion” from 2012). What you see on an HD TV is simply less colorful, less realistic than what you would experience in person.

This is where Quantum Dot TV’s come in. Newer UltraHD TV’s that use this technology can reproduce a much larger range of colors, over 90% of the BT.2020 color space shown above. For fireworks shows, this means that you would be able to experience the true oranges and blues that are part of the displays. Current technology cannot completely capture the red and green colors, but it is much closer than it used to be. These colors will be distorted much less than HDTV’s, providing a significantly improved experience.

When it comes to the 4th, you’ll still find me sitting out in the front row. But if you prefer watching fireworks from the comfort of your own living room, it’s about to get much better. Your pets will probably thank you too.

Reference: http://www.jpyro.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Kos-710-731.pdf

Reposted from the Nanosys Blog, 2016

About The Author

Allison Harn is the Manufacturing Operations Analyst at Nanosys. She has a background in chemistry and before coming to Nanosys taught high school chemistry for several years. Her current position supports operational excellence in quantum dot manufacturing by promoting continual improvement.

Are tennis balls yellow or green?

Posted on March 22, 2018 by Jeff Yurek

Tennis star Roger Federer’s answer to this seemingly innocuous question via twitter user @delaneyanndold caused a bit of a stir on social media earlier this week. According to Mr. Federer, tennis balls are very definitely yellow. He’s certainly an expert when it comes to tennis but how is his color accuracy? We applied some basic science to answer this important question once and for all. The answer might surprise you…

OKAY ITS OFFICIAL MY DAD JUST ASKED @rogerfederer IF TENNIS BALLS ARE YELLOW OR GREEN AND HE SAID THEY ARE YELLOW pic.twitter.com/EXdXRr0oFa

— Delaney Dold (@delaneyanndold) March 19, 2018

With his world-record 20 grand slam tennis championships, it’s likely few people on earth have spent more time looking at tennis balls than Roger Federer. He’s also backed up by the International Tennis Federation which has required all tennis balls be “yellow” in color for the last 46 years.

Case closed, team yellow for the win right?

Despite this overwhelming evidence in favor of yellow we still weren’t totally convinced. Reminiscent of the 2015 dress color controversy, Federer’s comment had Twitter users questioning reality. It turns out a large chunk of the population are totally shocked that tennis balls might be considered anything but green.

It’s understandable that Twitter users might be so passionate about this issue. After all, it can be a bit mind bending to think that much of the rest of the world sees such a common object as a completely different color.

So which is it? Are tennis balls green or yellow and, more importantly, why would we see them so differently? We had a hunch there might be more to this story so we set out to settle the debate once and for all with science…

Yellow vs Green

Before we answer the question, we need to define the colors yellow and green so we know what we are looking for. There is broad agreement that humans perceive wavelengths of light from 520 to 560 nanometers as “green” and 560 to 590 nanometers as “yellow”.

According to our Physics textbook, “Fundamentals of Atmospheric Radiation,” the color green is defined as 520-560nm and yellow as 560nm-590nm.

These two colors are right on top of each other so, right away, it’s easy to see why there might be some confusion here.

Capturing the spectra of a tennis ball with our Photo Research PR 655

With these wavelength ranges in mind for green and yellow, we grabbed our trusty spectroradiometer, our Wilson* Official US Open tennis ball, and captured some data. What we found when we plotted the data surprised us:

Measurement of light reflected from our tennis ball shows that the color is really green and yellow (or chartreuse). Shaded green and yellow regions represent generally accepted wavelength ranges for those colors.

Our original question turns out to be sort of a trick question. Tennis balls are neither green or yellow, they’re actually both green and yellow!

Looking at the data above, our tennis ball has a definite peak of reflected light at 525nm. 525nm is squarely in the green range but we would expect a pure green to have a bit more defined peak. Since we also see a significant amount of energy in the yellow range, a more accurate description of this tennis ball’s color might be “chartreuse” (link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(color)) which lies right between green and yellow.

Why do so many people see tennis balls as either green or yellow?

The colors we see are determined by three things: the physical color of light reflected by an object, the physiological, electrochemical process of the eye to convert that light into an electrical impulse and the psychological, the processing the brain does to create an image from that signal. We already measured the physical component so it’s the last piece, the psychological that we’re most interested in in understanding why we might disagree about an object’s color.

Seeing is not passive. Our brains add meaning to the light that our eyes detect based on context and experience and memory. We are continuously and actively re-visualizing and color-correcting the signal that comes out of our retinas.

One of the ways our collective brains may be influenced is by the appearance of tennis balls on TV. If tennis balls appear more yellow or more green on TV, that could shift our perception of the color. To find out if this might be a factor, we plotted our tennis ball into the CIE 1976 color space so we could compare it to a standard TV color gamut (if you’re not familiar with these charts, check out our primer on chromaticity diagrams).

The “color gamut” of a tennis ball, plotted in CIE 1976. Left: tennis ball compared to HDTV BT.709 and UltraHD TV BT.2020 color gamuts; Right: zoomed-in view showing the tennis ball chromaticity is just outside the BT.709 color gamut

Here we see that the tennis ball is a very saturated color that lies right between green and yellow. It’s also interesting that our tennis ball is right on the edge of the BT.709 color gamut used in HDTV broadcast. In fact, if we take a closer look at the zoomed-in chart on the right, the tennis ball is just outside the range of colors used by HDTVs.

Displays cannot simply recreate the exact spectra of light reflected off of a tennis ball that we measured above because displays create color through a totally different process called additive mixing. Displays mix just three primary colors of light (red, green and blue) to recreate millions of colors. In the case of a tennis ball, a display essentially tricks our eyes into seeing chartreuse, by mixing together red and green light. The quality of chartreuse that a display can reproduce is therefore determined by the quality of red and green light a display can reproduce.

Since the tennis ball falls outside the primary colors of the HDTV broadcast signal, this means that the color of a tennis ball is essentially impossible to accurately reproduce on a standard HDTV. Additionally, most HDTVs would not have the correct red and green to recreate our exact shade of chartreuse. As a result, the actual color that most TV viewers experience is based more on the creative decisions of broadcast crews and the color gamut mapping algorithm of their TV, which may be shifting the color more towards yellow.

If that’s the case, it would help explain why so many of us perceive tennis balls as yellow. That’s because they are yellow when they mean the most to us, which is on TV during an important match. This doesn’t quite explain Federer’s perception. Although it is quite possible that he’s watched enough endless hours of film working to improve his game, which he likely cares deeply about, to have shifted his view towards yellow.

It will be interesting to see if our collective tennis ball color perception begins to shift towards green or chartreuse as more and more people adopt UltraHD TVs with wide color gamut capabilities.

*: Note that we chose to use a Wilson ball since it’s the official ball of the US Open and we’re based in the US. As a future experiment, it might be interesting to test the ball used at other events like Wimbledon to see if there’s any international variance in color.

Special thanks to Ernie Lee and Brian Mui!

Color and Visceral App Design

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Jeff Yurek

Visceral refers to the gut, rather than the mind. Our brain may try to talk us out of jumping off a cliff, but as soon as we take that first step into the void, our guts take over. We respond with a rush of emotion and we can’t help but scream from terror or euphoria. It’s a purely visceral reaction. […]

So here’s my theory: I believe that introducing visceral elements into an app will take it past the point of just being awesome. It will make your app speak to the subconscious, built-in affinity that humans have for the physical properties I mentioned before.

That’s Rob Foster, co-founder of Mysterious Trousers, defining his theory about the importance of visceral elements in application design. The whole piece is well worth reading, especially if you are interested in design or have ever wondered just why Angry Birds is so unbelievably addictive.

In the quote above Rob is talking about the power of little kinetic events in applications like the bounce you get when scrolling to the bottom of a page on the iPhone or the satisfying little “pop” noise you hear when creating a new task in Clear. His point is well made, getting the details of these visceral elements right can clearly take an app from just useful to a truly engaging and even addictive experience for users.

While Rob’s piece focused on the impact of animation and sound, I wondered how color might factor into visceral application design.

Color choice is not just about beautiful graphics- it can also have a powerful physiological effect on us. We have a measurable response to aggressive colors like red, which may even cause a spike in testosterone levels. In fact, recent studies suggest that that the color of a uniform can affect the outcome of an Olympic wrestling match and onscreen colors can even influence how much you pay for something on eBay.

As mobile display technology improves, with more lifelike color and wider dynamic range, application designers may find that color becomes an even more powerful tool to elicit visceral responses from users.

Are tablets up to the task of accurate color testing?

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

Finally getting around to posting a follow-up to a follow-up to John The Math Guy’s recent series on color gamut size, colorblindness and tablet displays. I thought I might be able to at least shed a little more light on his question about the differences in color accuracy between some of these devices.

In his testing, John found no statistically significant difference in scores among different people taking the EnChroma colorblindness test on different devices. I found this somewhat surprising since, in my experience, even tablets with similar color gamuts tend to show colors with very different levels of accuracy.

To show what I mean by that, I measured how two different tablets show the colors found in the Gretag Macbeth color checker chart.

As you can see, the iPad mini and Nexus 7 each produce very different colors, even for those colors that are actually inside their gamuts.

For example, even though the iPad mini has enough gamut coverage to accurately display the Gretag chart’s deepest blue, it cannot do so without distorting the image in another way. This is because of data in the underlying image standard- most content today is encoded in the sRGB standard. If the iPad were to show that Gretag blue correctly, it would not have enough color saturation headroom left over to show you a different color if a deeper blue, say right at the bottom of the sRGB triangle, were called for.

A good real world example of this can be found in the picture below of my bloodhound, Louisa, racing down the beach at Carmel, CA. The middle of the sky in this image is right on the edge of the iPad’s color gamut, very similar to the Gretag blue in the charts above, while the deepest blues found in the ocean fall outside the iPad’s gamut.

If the iPad were striving for accuracy at all costs, it might map both colors right on top of each other at the edge of the gamut. There’d be no visible difference between the two in this case and the quality of the image would suffer but at least the sky would be accurate. In order to avoid this scenario, the designers of these devices have decided to compromise on accuracy so they can show a full range of color differences to the user.

They do this by remapping colors inward, away from the edges of the gamut, effectively compressing the gamut even further so that otherwise out-of-gamut colors can be seen. This is a good solution given the gamut limitations of the device since it results in more pleasing, if less accurate images.

As newer devices trend towards wider color gamuts this kind of compromise should become a thing of the past. In fact, tablet designers may be working on the reverse issue- how to avoid oversaturating images that were encoded for smaller gamuts.

Great, how does this relate to colorblindness again?

iPad mini vs Nexus 7 color accuracy comparison in CIE 1976

Taking another look at the Gretag results from the two devices plotted on top of each other, there clearly are major differences. But, in the reds and greens, two colors associated with a common form of color blindness, the devices are relatively close. So, the simple answer may just be that colorblindness tests do not require pinpoint accuracy to be effective, at least as basic screening tools.

Color of the year for 2013 falls outside sRGB gamut

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

Pantone recently announced their color of the year for 2013, a deep shade of emerald green that they call “Emerald 17-5641.” It’s a great color but there’s a catch- most displays cannot accurately show it.

Based on data from Pantone’s website, I was able to plot the color in CIE 1931 (xy). As you can see in the chart below, Pantone’s color is well outside the sRGB/rec.709 color gamut standard used by most HDTVs, the new iPad/iPhone and many desktop monitors. These devices will be stuck showing a version of Pantone’s emerald green that’s less saturated and probably a bit more yellow than the real thing.

This is a perfect example of a popular real-world color that falls outside of the sRGB/rec.709 gamut. Unless you have a monitor that’s able to show wider color gamuts, like the DCI-P3 or Adobe RGB standards, you are missing out on a great color.

So you bought a 4K TV, now where is the 4K content?

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

Content is king. One of the biggest challenges for emerging display technology is content availability. Whether it’s 3D, 4K or wide color gamut, these new features simply aren’t worth much without access lots of great, optimized content.

As new 4K TV’s begin hitting store shelves this year, they are entering a content vacuum.

Standards bodies like the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU) are still working out the precise definition of marketing terms like Ultra High Definition TV (UHDTV). Proposed standards could include support for eight million pixel resolution, extremely wide color gamut and 3D content. But, today, there is almost no content out there that takes full advantage of all of the exciting capabilities of the new sets.

And, unlike the transition to HDTV, there’s no government-mandated switch on the horizon to force broadcasters to get on board.

At least one set-maker is taking it upon themselves to solve this problem by delivering both the 4K content and hardware. Sony announced last week that it will loan a 4K Ultra HD video player loaded with UHD content to buyers of their new 84” UHD television. The selection of 4K content on this player is fairly limited for now, but as more titles are released, this approach could help drive adoption of high resolution and wide color gamut formats. I wouldn’t be surprised if other set makers started following suit, though Sony does have an inherent advantage, owning a movie studio.

How does ink thickness change the appearance of printed color?

Posted on October 11, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

We typically focus on color as it relates to displays here at dot-color, but I came across a fascinating post about color in the print industry from John the Math Guy that I had to share. In this post, John takes a close look at how ink looks at different thicknesses and uncovers the reasons for some seemingly unconventional color-naming habits in the print industry.

What happens when we double the amount of ink on the paper? …it would seem that the thick layer of magenta is a lot closer to red. The plot below shows the actual spectra of two magenta patches, one at a larger ink film thickness than the other. The plot leads one to the same impression – that a thick layer of magenta is closer to red in hue than a thin layer.

Chart shows different spectrums of thick (red line) and thin (blue line) layers of magenta ink.

Read the whole thing here: http://johnthemathguy.blogspot.com/2012/09/why-does-my-cyan-have-blues.html

Updated: How does the iPhone 5’s color saturation measure up against Apple’s claims?

Posted on September 27, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

Commenter William thankfully double checked our math and we’ve corrected a small error in our % NTSC calculation.

We finally got our hands on an iPhone 5 yesterday. I tried asking Siri if she really has 44% more color saturation but she wouldn’t give up the goods, so I went with plan B and aimed our PR-655 spectroradiometer at the phone to find out just how impressive the screen really is. A lot has already been written about this display, but not much empirical evidence has been published about the color performance. How does the screen actually stack up to the marketing claims?

In short, Apple did an exceptional job improving color saturation and display quality in general, but the unit we measured just missed the 44% more color saturation claim.

Measuring Up

The iPhone 5 has significantly more color saturation than the 4S.

The 44% more color claim for the iPhone 5 is the same claim Apple made for the new iPad. As with the iPad, increasing the color performance of the iPhone 4S by 44% of NTSC 1953 gamut, measured using the CIE 1931 color space, would result in color saturation matching the sRGB color standard. Using these standards as the goal posts, we measured the iPhone 5 at 70% of NTSC 1953 in CIE 1931, a 39% increase from the iPhone 4S, which measured at 50%. That’s 5% less of an improvement than Apple’s 44% claim and just 99% of sRGB (measured against the sRGB primaries).

While 5% less might seem like a big deal, getting to 99% of sRGB is a major feat and will result in tremendously noticeable color improvement in the phone. Additionally, color filters are notoriously difficult to manufacture. Slight variances in performance like this are common and most likely outside the range of a just noticeable difference for the average person.

If you want to know more about NTSC, CIE and sRGB, and why we are using standards from the 1930s, I have written extensively about this issue in the past.

How did they do it?

Much like they did with the new iPad, Apple significantly improved the color filter performance^† of the iPhone 5. Based on our experience, this type of improvement typically means that the display requires 20-30% more power to operate at the same brightness. Considering that the display is already a major source battery drain on the phone, this further underscores the engineering effort Apple made to keep battery life about the same as the 4S.

Let’s take a quick look at the changes in each of the red, green and blue color filters, starting with white, which is all three filters turned on:

Looking at the white spectrum of the iPhone 5, we see that the new color filters are very similar to those of the new iPad. Compared to the 4S, the peaks are slightly narrower, which improves color purity. In order to meet sRGB, they also moved to deeper reds and blues.

As with the new iPad, the biggest difference between the 4S and the 5 is in blue. Apple moved the peak to a deeper blue but, more importantly, they narrowed the filter so less green light leaks through. The green leakage causes blue to look a bit “aqua” on the 4S.

Retinal neuroscientist Bryan Jones looked at both displays under his stereo microscope earlier this week. His close-up shots really show off the difference in blue filters.

Apple again chose a slightly deeper wavelength of green which is less yellow and eliminated some of the blue leakage that had been muddying the green on the 4S.

The change here is subtle but as with the other filters, the peak is narrower, deeper in the red and leakage is reduced. One difference worth noting is that, while we are seeing less peak leakage in the red filter, there had been relatively broadband leakage across yellow, green and into blue that has been largely eliminated.

Conclusion

In all, it’s an exceptionally well-calibrated and accurate display for any kind of device, especially a smartphone. Apple has gone to great lengths to design a screen that brings the vibrancy of sRGB to the palm of your hand.
^† If you are not familiar with color filters or the inner-workings of LCDs in general this great live teardown by Bill Hammack is well worth watching: http://youtu.be/jiejNAUwcQ8

Seeing red: can color change your spending habits?

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

Color can have a powerful physiological effect on us. This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever been wowed by a Monet or a Rothko. But color can affect us in ways you never imagined. Recent studies suggest that that the color of a uniform can affect the outcome of an Olympic wrestling match and onscreen colors can influence how much you pay for something on eBay.

In one study, researchers found that Olympic wrestlers wearing red won as much as 60% of the time, even against evenly matched opponents (who wore a different color).

US Wrestler Jake Varner (red) on his way to defeating Valerie Andriisteve of Ukraine in the 96-kg freestyle wrestling gold match in London. Credit: The ASSOCIATED PRESS

Similarly, in a Journal of Consumer Research study on the impact of color on consumers who buy items on auction sites like eBay, authors Rajesh Bagchi and Amar Cheema found that “red background color induces aggression through a feeling of arousal and it increases aggression relative to blue or gray backgrounds. This causes individuals to make higher bids in auctions but lower offers in negotiations.”

Why? The exact mechanism remains a mystery but researchers see some evidence that aggressive colors like red may actually cause a spike in testosterone levels.

I find it particularly fascinating that color choice did not specifically correlate to the price someone paid for an item. Instead, the colors drove more or less aggressive behavior, which lead participants to either seek the best deal possible against a salesperson or to beat out competing bids in an auction.

It got me wondering how retailers might be using color to influence purchasing. A quick survey of some popular online shopping destinations yielded potentially interesting results. Since product background is not always in the control of the retailer, I looked at the “add to cart” areas of three popular online retailers: Apple, Amazon and eBay.

All three employ a lot of blue, a calming color, in their ‘add to cart’ areas. Apple uses a shade of green, another calming color, for the “add to cart” button. Amazon lists the price in a dark red, while Apple uses a lighter shade to accentuate free shipping.

Next time you find yourself shopping either online or brick and mortar, take note of the colors around you – you may be surprised by how far your environment is being manipulated to get you to pay more.

Color Space Confusion

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

For many who are new to the world of display measurement, the prevalence of two distinct, but often-interchanged color spaces can be a source of confusion. Since my recent post about the color performance of Apple’s new iPad, a number of people have asked about this topic, so I thought it would be worth a closer look.

In the world of displays and color images, there exists a variety of separate standards for mapping color, CIE 1931 and CIE 1976 being the most popular among them. Despite its age, CIE 1931, named for the year of its adoption, remains a well-worn and familiar shorthand throughout the display industry. As a marketer of high color gamut display components, I can tell you from firsthand experience that CIE 1931 is the primary language of our customers. When a customer tells me that their current display “can do 72% of NTSC,” they implicitly mean 72% of NTSC 1953 color gamut as mapped against CIE 1931.

However, from the SID International Committee for Display Metrology’s (ICDM) recent, authoritative Display Measurement Standard:

“…we strongly encourage people to abandon the use of the 1931 CIE color diagram for determining the color gamut… The 1976 CIE (u’,v’) color diagram should be used instead. Unfortunately, many continue to use the (x,y) chromaticity values and the 1931 diagram for gamut areas.”

So why are there two standards, and why are we trying to declare one of them obsolete? Let me explain.

What is a color space?

First, a little background on color spaces and how they work.

While there are a number of different types of color spaces, we are specifically interested in chromaticity diagrams, which only measure color quality, independent of other factors like luminance. A color space is a uniform representation of visible light. It maps the all of the colors visible to the human eye onto an x-y grid and assigns them measureable values. This allows us to make uniform measurements and comparisons between colors, and offers certainty that images look the same from display to display when used to create color gamut standards.

In 1931, the Commission internationale de l’éclairage or CIE (International Commission on Illumination in English) defined the most commonly used color space. Here’s a look at the anatomy of the CIE 1931 color space:

What makes a good color space?

An effective color space should map with reasonable accuracy and consistancy to the human perception of color. Content creators want to be sure that the color they see on their display is the same color you see on your display.

This is where the CIE 1931 standard falls apart. Based on the work of David MacAdam in the 1940’s, we learn that the variance in percieved color, when mapped in the CIE 1931 color space, is not linear from color to color. In other words, if you show a group of people the same green, then map what they see against the CIE 1931 color space, they will report seeing a wide decprepancy of different hues of green. However, if you show the same group a blue image, there will be much more agreement on what color blue they are seeing. This uneveness creates problems when trying to make uniform measurements with CIE 1931.

The result of MacAdam’s work is visualized by the MacAdam Elipses. Each elipse represents the range of colors respondents reported seeing when shown a single color, which was the dot in the center of each elipse:

A better standard

It was not until 1976 that the CIE was able to settle on a significantly more linear color space. If we reproduce MacAdam’s work using the new standard, variations in percieve color are minimalized and the MacAdam’s Elipses mapped on a 1976 CIE diagram appear much more evenly sized and circular, as opposed to oblong. This makes color comparisons using CIE 1976 significantly more meaningful.

The difference of the CIE 1976 color space, particularly in blue and green, is immediately apparent. As an example, lets look at the color gamut measurements of the iPad 2 and new iPad we used in an earlier article. Both charts do a reasonably good job of conveying the new iPad’s increased gamut coverage at all three primaries. But, the 1976 chart captures the dramatic perceptual difference in blue (from aqua to deep blue) that you actually see when looking at the displays side by side:

The increased gamut of the new iPad is worth testing. Next time you find yourself in an Apple store, grab an iPad 2, hold it alongside a new iPad, Google up a color bar image and see the difference for yourself.

So, why do we still use CIE 1931 at all? The only real answer is that old habits die hard. The industry has relied on CIE 1931 since its inception, and change is coming slowly.

Fortunately, CIE 1931’s grip is loosening over time. The ICDM’s new measurement standard should eventually force all remaining stragglers to switch over to the more accurate 1976 standard. Until then, you can familiarize yourself with a decent color space conversion calculator, such as the handy converter we built just for this purpose:

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