"There are colors that I want to show you, but I can’t. They exist in the real world. You probably saw some of them today, but I can’t show them to you on a screen. A digital photograph can’t capture them, and your screen can’t display them. No game you’ve ever played has contained them. Unless you have specialized equipment, they are entirely absent from the digital world.
Most of them are cyans."
https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/where-to-find-the-colors-your-screen-cant-show-you/
Back in the days of Analog television in the US, the standard was known as NTSC (it didn't really stand for Never Twice the Same Color, but it should have.)
It was an amazing method of sending a color TV signal in a way that was completely compatible with the old black and white sets (whose designers had not considered color being sent at all, thus had made no provision for it in the specifications.) It also allowed for a color set to show a black and white broadcast without odd color artifacts showing up.
That's where the color gamuts and phosphor choices first reared their heads - and part of the issue was how much color signal you could transmit using NTSC. This wasn't much of a problem when everything was analog from camera to set - you turned a dial at the camera to make sure the colors weren't too bright, all good.
In the mid 1980s, we started to see digital paint systems that could make frames of broadcast TV. They had the ability to make way, way more colors than NTSC could show, because they were directly coupled to the RGB inputs of the monitors.
We realized this problem when our graphics started going on air and we got phone calls from the satellite providers - the images had such high color signals that they were affecting the next channel over, and you could see Station 1's image as ghostly blurring on Station 2.
We then had to train the Paint operators on the concept of "illegal colors" and the size of the FCC fines involved. Fun times!
And another tidbit - originally, the phosphor dots of color on the inside of the picture tube were round. The electron beam which was scanned across the inside of the tube face would tend to widen out in transit, so a metal screen with an identical pattern of tinier holes was placed behind the dots, in perfect alignment - it was called the shadow mask, and made the image sharper because only one dot was hit at any instant.
Then Sony invented the Trinitron tube - it had three adjacent rectangles, not dots. Brighter, technically easier to implement because it used an array of vertical wires as an aperture grille, an overall improvement.
HOWEVER, we in the broadcasting centers were NOT to use Trinitron CRTs.
Why not, you might ask?
The red dot phosphor wasn't the "proper" color of red, it was more orange. If we used the wrong colors on our monitor walls, what looked right in the studio would look wrong in the houses.
We tried pointing out that with the way those TVs were selling, the more orange version of red would be the default standard in no time, and our monitors would be the outliers. We were told that the standard was the standard, red was red, not orange, and we could only buy dot phosphor monitors.
We were also told that our studios would never transmit more than a single channel of audio per channel of video.
Both those proclamations lasted about a year.
@mhoye "If colorspaces and the CIE chromaticity diagram are already familiar to you, you can skip to the next section".
I know a bit, but reaf anyways. Now I'm wondering about who invented color TV, how does color film chemistry works, and why film is not transparent but brownish.
@mhoye and also: what's the sensor on a non digital TV camera?
And also: THAT's why forest digital pics suck!
And also: wanna see color? Go see the world!
And...
Excellent article.
De coloribus et gustibus non disputandum...
At least, things are improving. I lived through working with the 216 web safe colours, frustratingly limiting. Screens generally have a much wider gamut than print processes too.
Today I notice the limitations of my TV screens when sharing an image from the iPad. Sadly, HDR monitors are still out of my budget as a hobbyist, but they sure do look good.
Fantastic article btw!
@mhoye thank you for sharing that.
It's annoying reading about colours when there is literally no way to show them in the article! It has given me the impulse I needed today to go outside and find some natural blues and greens to experience.
@mhoye This is just a beautiful explanatory piece. Straightforward to design labs to explore this in class - like middle school physical science even, (I wonder if you can even see this with a super-cheap, diffraction-grating spectroscope? Probably a USB spectrometer would be better if there's a little budget)
@mhoye cool article and their general conclusions seem correct, but if you read all the way to the end:
> For data only present in a figure in a paper, I had Gemini 3.1 Pro extract it from the figure at 10 nm intervals, then plotted the extracted data to make sure it matched the original source without any gross errors.
That means some data may have subtle errors the author didn't catch.
Useful (if unreliable) work done, but it destroys the human sources that enabled it (and their biosphere)
@mhoye I am stating how things are. Why label that? You can see it in a positive light :
Look at a colourful picture or hear an orchestra in full flow - your brain magnificently created these experiences.
Try it.
@mhoye I already knew most of the theory (my background is visualization, with a particular passion for color vision and perception), but this was such a great read, and I loved all the examples! Definitely saving it for re-read and to share next time I try to explain this!
My work is entirely screen-based so I don't use CIE colorspace outside of educational purposes. That said, I'm also a hobby artist so I wanted to share a handful of paint and dye resources that might be of interest to you:
@mhoye Pantone colors might be the easiest starting point. This calculator gives you the best Pantone match for L*a*b* coordinates. https://pantonetools.com/converters/lab-to-pantone
They sell color cards for matching but they're really expensive. Their postcard set is somewhat affordable ($20 for 50 cards) but also pretty limited in what is actually included. On the plus side, their color codes are used widely in industry so this could be a good way to find examples that don't translate to RGB, like some car paints.
@mhoye For more practical use of actual paints:
Kimberly Crick has a database of pigments and paints used in watercolor. She doesn't have CIE info, but this is a great place to find out what pigments are available by which brands, and how they behave. https://www.kimcrick.com/pages/blue-art-supply-pigment-database-watercolor-acrylic-ink-pencil-color-chart-swatch
Daniel Smith is one of the most popular high quality brands and they have an interactive CIE map showing most of their products but its notably missing the fluorescent ones https://danielsmith.com/color-map/
Artist reference guide to Blue pigments in art supplies. Color chart swatch cards of common pigments in watercolor, gouache, acrylic paint and inks. Includes brand lightfast ratings (plus notes if my independent test found the color to be fugitive), indexed by pigment number code, brand, manufacturer color
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