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RGB to become RGBCMY
elgatozorbas writes "The basic color elements of television have not changed much since 1954; a half-century after RCA introduced the first color set, the RGB (red, green and blue) system used then still prevails. But Israeli company Genoa Color Technologies has broken the RGB barrier by adding one to three primary colors such as yellow, cyan and magenta, thus expanding - from 55 to 95 percent - the coverage of the visible color gamut. The promised result of this multi-primary color (MPC) technology is a television picture that, with its truer, more vibrant color and brighter image, looks more like cinema than video. Also covered in IEEE Spectrum."
Does this mean I should hold off on buying an HDTV?
It's almost enough to make me wish I was a mutant mother of a color blind son.
A truly revolutionary idea would be to include and project IR and UV in addition to RGB/CMY. Even though our eyes can't exactly 'see' IR and UV, they still form an important part of our realistic image perception. It's not unlike sounds above 20-25kHz in pitch; we don't 'hear' them, but our brain perceives them nonetheless and they are used for stereo imaging of a space.
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Adding two extra colors to this kind of projection television has little impact on the price tag, says Simon Lewis, vice president of marketing at Genoa. He says the new Philips color-enhanced set, to be available next year, needs only a few additional filters and optical components to create the yellow and cyan light, with no changes to the more costly microprojection chip.
Right. Right when we've got all these plants around the world cranking out inexpensive TV's using LEDS and LCD, some whizzo comes along and says, "Hey, look, a great idea and all you have to do is retool everything, develop some newer technology and keep selling it all at the same pricing you're currently at!"
Perhaps the main challenge in converting a video stream from a three- to a five-primary color system is doing it in real time, says Maureen C. Stone, ...
Yay, now we really will need a computer in every TV! More components - more to go wrong, more power consumption, etc.
"How the algorithm does that, precisely, is a secret well kept by Genoa. "It's part of their intellectual property," Stone says.
Yay, more intellectual property. This should drive prices down.
<curmudgeon>
Why, back in my day we didn't have remote controls and we had a folded playing card stuck beside the tuner knob to keep the picture from doing funny things, and we liked it!
</curmudgeon>
I'm sure it will look lovely, while watching older stuff from the bad old pre RGBCMY days.
"Gilligan!"
I'm like, totally there, dude!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yes, our eyes only have three types of cones, but unlike the color projected by a TV, they are not designed to respond to just one frequency of red, one of green, and one of blue. they have broad, overlapping response curves, each cone giving a different level of signal depending on the frequency of the light. The brain figures out the color based on the response of all three types of cones, not just the one that is active.
The stuff above is fact, the rest of this post is my pointless, unscientific, meandering hypothesis:
Obviously we use this concept with RGB signals to create colors like yellow, by tickling both the red and green cones at once with neighboring phosphors, but since the two colors are coming from very very slightly different places, the brain is not necessarily satisfied that it really is the color yellow. Basically, the more spectrum we can cover natively, the less chance there will be of someone's brain mumbling "that color doesn't seem... right"
Random and weird software I've written.
Nothing. This just provides a better way to stimulate them. If one had the technology to vary the intensity of red, green, and blue over an infinite set of real values, then RGB would be able to perfectly replicate any color. In reality, the RGB color model used in displays today varies these values over a finite set of integers. One gets the best ability to reproduce colors that are red, green, or blue. Colors between these on the spectrum can be simulated by mixing these, thanks to the three types of cones we used to process color on the retina, but if in order to reproduce a particular color, we need 255 parts red to 41 parts green, we simply cannot increase the intensity of this color without distorting it (shifting towards green, because we've already maxed red). Thus, any RGB color model is going to more accurately and vibrantly display reds, greens, and blues, and simpler blends of these (where all values are equal, e.g. cyan), anything else is going to be limited in the range, grosser in steps between intensity, and less vibrant at the max. Adding pixels that display actual yellow (light of precisely that wavelength, rather than a blend of red and green wavelenght light exploiting the trick to stimulate our red and green cones to the same levels that actual yellow-wavelength light would), adding these pixels would increase the ability to accurately display these between colors, despite the fact that, in theory, only RGB is necessary. It's easier to add more between color pixels than to up the intensity range and lower the steps between intensities.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I'll wait for HDR display and feeds, thanks.
Judging from the gamut chart for this RGBCMY, the boost in color range is primarily in yellows and cyans. Gold, as they note, would be a good application. Cyan.. well, that's mostly skies - and those already appear just fine on TV. A fairly decent increase in magentas/purples as well (when taking the assymetric lobe into account), but again.. not seeing its application much.
Unless following the British royal family (lots of golds and purples) a lot, it doesn't appear to offer all that much. Especially considering movie people butcher things anyway (DVD gives a more stable picture, sure.. at the compromise of mpeg artifacting and even encoding issues.. twitches ever 25 frames are annoying - luckily only a few suffer from this).
On the other hand, a higher dynamic range would be immediately noticeable anywhere.
A sequence with the sun glaring into the camera ?
A car's headlights shining at the camera ?
Highlights on objects ?
Blown-out surfaces from bright lighting ?
All that could then more accurately be represented. And thanks to most things still being shot on film, or already on 10bit CCDs with, formally, underexposure but a gain for the operator, a good bit of extra range is already available in previous and current productions.
Whilst RGBCMY would only really be of use for film (as in, actual film) productions, as digital cameras are in much the same RGB limbo that current displays are.
Wow, this is really cool.
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There's a whole bunch of these wide gamut and high dynamic range displays suddenly.
At SIGGRAPH this year, there was a 6-primary (RGBCMY) projection system called IRODORI on display in emerging technologies:
http://www.siggraph.org/s2004/conference/etech/ir
There was also a high dynamic range display (capable of a greater range of brightness) from Sunnybrook Technologies at E-Tech:
http://www.siggraph.org/s2004/conference/etech/hi
And then I saw a few displays on the exhibition floor from NEC with a "WG" specifier for "Wide Gamut". NEC's WG monitor is still RGB but with purer R, G, and B phosphors to obtain a gammut wider than Adobe RGB.
And now there's this one. Way cool.
I can't wait till this becomes more widespread. The question becomes, what will the next color standard be for use in applications and APIs? It doesn't make sense to actually encode color as 6 values for display, since (most) humans only have three kinds of cones. It would make more sense to use something like CIEXYX for color interchange in that case. Especially if we're going to have this wierd mix of HDR and various wide gamut displays around for a while, each which has slightly different needs for color output. Best to just go with a neutral, well-defined intermediate colorspace.
It's probably simpler than you think.
CMY are really "combinations" of R G and B.
So, what's happening is that they are tossing in "intermediate" colors in roughly the same way as a 6 or 7 color printer. The exact equations are probably proprietary, but the process is pretty standard.
This comes in to play at two places. First, HDTV has a pretty ambitious color gamut, so videos designed around the HDTV gamut will look better, assuming of course that the source footage is equally high quality.
Second, there are colors that your eye can perceive that are not representable by the RGB system.
Overall, the research is already done. There's actually quite a few different ways to represent this data. PhotoCDs already use it. You want to use L*a*b or XYZ or one of the other CIE color systems.
I think it's interesting, but when I read the headline, my first thought was "Gee. What took them so long?"
Gentoo Sucks
CMY are really "combinations" of R G and B.
This is false. C, Y, and M are different wavelengths of light from R, G, and B. Because the human eye only has receptors for R, G, and B, we can't distinguish between equal quantities of R and G and a single wavelength in between the two, namely Y. In other words, we are able to trick the eye into perceiving a full color spectrum using only three different wavelengths of light.
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I had never tried to think outside the RGB world because it 'technically' displays all colors, though it struck me that the colors in-between RGB will come out dimmer than they should.
No, RGB technically displays more discrete colors than our eye can see. That does not mean it "displays all colors." There are some colors RGB displays that we cannot distinguish between, and there are some colors we can distinguish that RGB cannot display.
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