Tom Scott
7 HN mentions · mentioned in 6 months, 2018–2026
3:52 · 9.7M views · Jul 18, 2017
Tom Scott explains why a vivid pink pigment by artist Stuart Semple cannot be fully shown on a screen, and touches on the dispute over exclusive rights to the blackest black pigment. It is a short explainer on color gamuts and pigment politics.
Cited as an example of colors too vibrant for monitors and pigments outside the sRGB gamut.
7 comments from Hacker News
> It is sometimes associated with our inability to think of new colors, but I think this is a completely different problem. As an aside, thinking of a new color is relatively easy. You can sorta actually see new colors just by making a really good pigment[0], or shooting cone cells with lasers[1]. But there's also the possibility of having a new photoreceptor . In which case, you don't just gain 1 new color. You gain 3 new secondary colors, plus an entire new type of 4 "tertiary colors", each of which is as visually distinct as cyan, magenta, and yellow are. And the colorspace itself becomes a 4-dimensional volume, with every existing color able to blend into smooth graduations of the new cone cell signal. [0] this video [1] [LINK]
There's a few dyes (mostly pinks and cyans) that are outside sRGB space (though once you apply them to a material, that combination of material and dye might be fine), Tom Scott had a video a few years ago, though I don't know if that particular dye/seller is still going: this video There's also Vantablack and similar ultra-black dyes which are a somewhat adjacent phenomena but in the same category of "colors your screen can't display". The most black a pixel can be is "off" (and that's only achievable if the display is on if your screen is an OLED), and the back coating of your screen is probably not as black as those dyes.
For a small set of other color-related videos, have a look at two from Tom Scott: • "The Library of Rare Colors": [LINK] • "I Can't Show You How Pink This Pink Is": this video The latter video makes me wonder: Is there a good way of finding out if a monitor, or even an entire color space, can contain this color? This may be a pigment where you really can't tell exactly what it looks like on-screen, because either the screen cannot display the color or the color space being used can not encode the color (or because the camera sensor can't properly capture the color).
Where can I view these brilliant colors in person? Apparently these colors are so vibrant, they cannot be accurately displayed on monitors: this video
Relevant: "I can't show you how pink this pink is." by Tom Scott this video Also relevant, his piece on "The Library of Rare Colors" [LINK]