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UCF Research Could Bring 'Drastically' Higher Resolution To Your Phone and TV (ucf.edu)
New submitter cinemetek quotes a report from University of Central Florida: Researchers at the University of Central Florida have developed a new color changing surface tunable through electrical voltage that could lead to three times the resolution for televisions, smartphones and other devices. Current LCD's are made up of hundreds of thousands of pixels that display different colors. With current technology, each of these pixels contain three subpixels -- one red, one green, one blue. UCF's NanoScience Technology Center (Assistant Professor Debashis Chanda and physics doctoral student Daniel Franklin) have come up with a way to tune the color of these subpixels. By applying differing voltages, they are able to change the color of individual subpixels to red, green or blue -- the RGB scale -- or gradations in between. By eliminating the three static subpixels that currently make up every pixel, the size of individual pixels can be reduced by three. Three times as many pixels means three times the resolution. That would have major implications for not only TVs and other general displays, but augmented reality and virtual-reality headsets that need very high resolution because they're so close to the eye.
I'm not sure if my eyes can see all of the resolution I have.. so I'll take the same resolution I have now, but at half the price please.
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Current displays do still use subpixels, they're just smaller so harder to see - e.g. read this - https://support.apple.com/el-g...
Except for the fact that many (I would assume most) colors don't actually fall anywhere on the color spectrum, but are instead a blending of multiple "pure" colors as perceived by our RGB retinas.
Consider even a pure-gas florescent tube - the color of the light given off is actually a combination of the multiple independent emission wavelengths of the element being excited - look at it through a spectroscope and you can see the individual pure colors - none of which closely resemble the color you see with your naked eye.
The most accurate perceived colors would probably actually be achieved by RGB subpixels that perfectly match the excitation frequencies of the cones in our eyes, combined with extremely fine-grained output levels. We can't actually see any other frequencies directly anyway - our color perception is based on interpreting the relative excitation of the three different "band pass filters" embodied in the different kinds of cones.
Though... come to think of it I'm not at all certain they have a simple band-pass style response curve - the detector molecules might actually have fairly complicated multi-peaked response curve.
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FWIW as you noted, the cones in our eyes have "band-pass" filters in order form them so to accurate receive colors is not really that important the for the RGB spectra of the pixels match the LMS (long medium short) band-pass filters of the cones in your eye, only that the relative response is maintained.
Having said that the way you sense colors is not at all how your eye receives the stimulus from the cones in your eyes. First of all, the colors are not sensed as relative responses, but opponent color responses: L-M (aka R-G), L+M-S (aka Y-B) and intensity. This makes for some interesting colors that are not sensed (e.g., reddish-green and yellowish-blue) and even some "impossible" colors. This amplifies any mismatch in your "filters" so unless they are *exact*, you will sense the difference.
Fortunately (unfortunately?) the way we perceive colors is different than the way we sense colors. Your brain is really painting the colors for your perception in your visual cortex after it's done some "white-balancing" too so what color you remember is a significantly influence by your setting and context. Remember the blue/black dress that broke the internet (or was it gold)?
Long story short, what you think of as perceiving color is really only "hinted" at by the cone response in your eyes. Any ability to distinguish "shades" of color is really a contrast response, not a color frequency response.
Back to this new technology, of course if you are a "traditionalist" and still believe in absolute color and frequency responses and gamuts, probably won't like this new technology at all given these pathetic gamut tracings, but if you follow a bit down the rabbit hole of your visual cortex, and look at what was once possible with Kinemacolor a (simple two-color) processes and realize that what most people think of as color, really isn't how you perceive color at all, it is really all in your head.