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Comment by pcunite | Hacker News Reader

Even though I don't work with photo realistic images and thus have to ensure accurate color, I still enjoy my NEC 2490WUXi2 monitor bought back in the day when I was an image editor. I was targeting sRGB for a webzine I was a part of.

As applications break out of the grayness that once defined them and become HTML5 based, designers would do well to understand how their colors will be displayed. Eventually, all displays will probably be IPS or some similar tech and be calibrated at the factory. The new Microsoft Surface Book has good and accurate colors from what I understand.

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I think factory color calibration for every device with a display is a pipe dream. It simply doesn't provide enough value to the user for the extra effort you'd have to go to.

I think the more realistic option is some sort of easy home calibration solution, perhaps leveraging smartphones or consumer DSLRs.

The end goal will be displays that have extremely low per-copy variation and therefore don't need individual calibration for reasonably accurate colour. Most of Apple's products with retina displays are really good out of the box.

(Of course, this all depends on your definition of "accurate". We're still not there yet for professional colour work.)

There's also a strong temptation to increase the saturation and gamma to stand out in brief side-by-side comparisons. It's the visual equivalent of loudness war audio mastering.

My local sports stadium (Allianz Stadium, Sydney Australia) recently installed two enormous ultra-wide 27 by 10 metre screens. They are astonishingly clear and bright, however the saturation is pumped up so hard that grass looks like Simpsons-esque nuclear sludge and many team uniforms look fluorescent or luminescent.

It's particularly surprising because it's constantly being used to replicate the reality right in front of it. You can just look at the pitch to see what grass should look like.

No, you see, the display shows you what the grass really is and what it would look like to you if your eyes could pick out the vibrant hues in real life. /s

We should really retire sRGB as the standard monitor colourspace and use 16-bit linear floats per channel. Every single image operator gets really tricky if you work in 8-bit sRGB and most don't bother, i.e. they treat 0-255 as linear values and everything from anti-aliasing to blitting to blurring is absolutely broken in all standard desktop applications. It's a bit better if you do 3d rendering with OpenGL/Direct3D, since their entire pipeline is linear and all you have to do is set the "this texture is in sRGB colourspace" bit on every texture and convert the final colour from linear RGB to sRGB in your shader.

Meh, it's a good smell test. If a given tool doesn't even get sRGB correct, there's probably several dozen other ways the designer failed to understand how graphics work.

Today I can just pop the first image on this page <http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html> into an image editor. If I don't see the Dalai Lama after downscaling, it's probably a poor quality editor beside its sRGB fail. It's like Van Halen's M&Ms.

Remove the extraneous angle bracket to fix the link.

Mac OS X's exposé does some funky stuff to that image :)

Surprising that HN includes the angle bracket as part of the link... I'm pretty sure using angle brackets like that to delineate a link is recommended in some major RFC...

Fixed link here, thanks: http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html

I used to own a LCD2490WUXI. But, after I realized how bad color profile support is in most apps, I eventually replaced it with a trio of U2414H and calibrate them the dumb way.

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