I wish people writing about new broad-gamut displays would at least include a brief mention of the downsides of extremely narrow-wavelength-band primary colors:<p>Such displays can create dramatic “observer metamerism” problems, where different people view the colors on screen significantly differently from each-other – even if they would see real-world objects relatively similarly – because slight differences in color vision are amplified by color sources with spiky spectra. Even worse, spiky spectra tend to cause a noticeable difference between foveal and peripheral color perception.<p>References: <a href="http://rit-mcsl.org/fairchild/PDFs/PRO30.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://rit-mcsl.org/fairchild/PDFs/PRO30.pdf</a> <a href="http://cias.rit.edu/media/uploads/faculty-f-projects/1304/documents/239/modeling-observer-metamerism.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://cias.rit.edu/media/uploads/faculty-f-projects/1304/do...</a><p>Just did a google search, and there’s also some discussion here <a href="http://www.avsforum.com/forum/139-display-calibration/1908505-why-current-leds-oleds-breaking-cie1931-observer-model.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.avsforum.com/forum/139-display-calibration/190850...</a><p>Personally, I also feel like spiky-spectrum displays and light sources give me more eyestrain and seem less pleasant to look at. But I admit that such an effect might be entirely in my head.<p>I’m looking forward to the day when we have displays with 6+ primaries, or maybe even reflective displays (not backlit) with 6+ subtractive color primaries.
In case anyone else was annoyed by the lack of technical details:<p>Old (Rec. 709) colour space: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CIExy1931_Rec_709.svg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CIExy1931_Rec_709.svg</a><p>New (Rec. 2020) colour space:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CIExy1931_Rec_2020.svg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CIExy1931_Rec_2020.svg</a><p>Most of the "new colours" are greens and turquoises; reds can now be slightly brighter, but blue is almost unchanged.
As someone who is used to being unable to distinguish between similar shades of color, this strikes me as somewhat funny. So much ado about a few missing nuances.