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Comment by zeristor | Hacker News Reader

At what point would it be worth accommodating to these tetrachromats?

Sensors, displays, software.

Unicode encompasses vast numbers of characters, wouldn’t an update to colour science and displays be in order?

When they're well into the double-digit percentage of the population, I guess. (Not just technically tetrachromats but actually able to discern a 4-dimensional color space).

Since they can perceive more colors, it's never an accessibility issue, so it's far more important to accommodate dichromats, and that's already very hard because we can't tell how a person with a different set of cones would perceive a particular color just by looking at it.

Also, we already have a color model that can't reproduce true cyan as perceived by "regular" trichromats, and so far that hasn't been a real issue.

What is the problem with cyan? That there is no adequate color space that can create more or less cyan? I would think it is just a mix of green and blue, no?

Is the same true for magenta as well? Is it a problem to convert between RGB and CMYK?

RGB only spans a triangle within the full colour space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-gamut_RGB_color_space#/me.... So the cyan generated by blue and green isn't as saturated as it could be.

I see, thank you. I took a long look at the diagram and could not discern a difference between colors within and outside the triangle until it alarmingly slowly dawned on me.

Would really like to have a comparison between a monitor that can display those colors now. Apparently there are some more expensive monitors that can display an extended palette.

For anyone puzzled by the graphic's D50 whitepoint marker being in yellow, offset from the color background's whitepoint (the white intersection of the 3 "arms"), yeah, that's wrong. There's historically been a lot of broken chromaticity code out there, and associated flawed diagrams.

Some screens have a yellow colour in addition to the usual RGB. For trichromats this just lets us see more intense yellows, but for tetrachromats it would let the screen display every hue they can see, rather than just a subset.

Yes, but the software to drive those (4 color SPR) subpixel rendered screens is limited to an RGB color gamut at the compression and transport levels (DSC / DisplayPort, HDMI). Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if their weren't optimizations most of us can't see that could be jarring for a tetrachromat.

At which point? Perhaps if you are a tetrachromat, then it would be worthwhile.

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