A blasphemy....I know....

05-03-10: Ericjcabrera
shouldn't be cmyk? (cyan magenta yellow black)
Ericjcabrera

No. Cyan/magenta/yellow are the primary pigments--the primary colors of *reflected* light. Red/green/blue are the primary colors of direct light.

05-03-10: Ryanmartinson
The TV might look great, but as far as adding yellow, it's gotta be pure marketing bullsh#t. The RGB spectrum already has yellow (it's just not in the acronym), so they're not adding anything.

Ryan

The division of red/green/blue is arbitrary and the lowest number of colors possible to *approximately* cover all of them. This method takes the visible light spectrum and divides it equally into three parts; the visible products are red, green, and blue. But if you look at a lot of TVs and even after you adjust them, you'll find that some favor greens, some are redder, and some, no matter how you twiddle the knobs, just can't do neutral grey shadows or believable skin tones. Or sometimes there's a persistent green tint that--by the time you adjust it out--goes straight into overly red.

This is because the 3 color system works, but it isn't perfect. Lithographers have known this for nearly 200 years. I have hanging in my living room a limited edition litho of a pair of Siamese cats. Standard color printing requires 4 colors of ink--magenta, cyan, yellow, and black. This litho used 6 colors--the standard four plus specially mixed inks of blue and green to more accurately capture the color of the cats' eyes and the foliage surrounding them as depicted in the original watercolor painting. The lithographer wouldn't have gone to that trouble if the standard 4 inks would have sufficed.

One could create an entirely different color system by dividing the visible light spectrum into (for example) six segments. Then there would be six different colors than the three primaries we're accustomed to. Color renditions would be more accurate as well.

Makes sense since my printer has 6 different colors and some have more.

Johnny is correct. In art school they will have you buy a couple of extra tubes of color as the three cannot produce all of the colors without some additions. I can understand why this might work on a screen as well.

I laugh at my GF when she tells me yellow and blue make green. Then we make mad passionate love to resolve the arguement.

some of you are confusing the mixing of pigments to produce color, and spectra of light. They are not the same thing and do not work the same way. Mix all the colors on your palette, you get a dark, dirty gray. All the colors in the spectra combined equals white, clear light.

Most monitors reproduce only about 70% of the color spectrum in an NTSC signal. The best ones (e.g., Sony Qualia) produce the whole enchilada. You don't know what you're missing until you see it done right, as apparenly Larry did.