Hacker News Reader

Comment by doikor | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people have a terrible conception of what proper white is.

Often what many think of as white is white mixed with blue. This is super evident after properly calibrating the white point of a (good) TV. Most casual viewers will say that the whites are now yellow/orange but in reality they are just used to always looking at white with a lot of blue mixed in.

I've had similar experience with a interior designer friend of mine who told me my new white walls were not white but cream. I have a spectrophotometer that pretty clearly said that my walls were closer to white then his walls that he insisted were proper white (they were white mixed with blue)

View on HN

> Often what many think of as white is white mixed with blue. This is super evident after properly calibrating the white point of a (good) TV. Most casual viewers will say that the whites are now yellow/orange but in reality they are just used to always looking at white with a lot of blue mixed in.

"White" is tricky, because it's dependent on color temperature of the light which is illuminating the given surface. If someone is used to viewing white objects under daylight, but you're calibrating their TV to match the color temperature of their indoor environment (which proper calibration should do), then the "white" displayed on their TV will be a fundamentally different color from the "white" they see reflected off a white surface outside.

This effect is going to be found to be doubly true if you're calibrating to indoor lighting in the evening, but they watch their TV at noon in the daylight with the windows open -- because the color temperature of the environment will now be much higher than the color temperature of the screen.

It seems to be a kind of common knowledge that a bit of blue makes a white look whiter. I wonder if there's any studies done on this tho.

Might be relevant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_brightener

That’s color temperature. A bit of blue makes white look more like white does in direct sunlight, which we think of as whiter.

A but of orange will make white look more like white does in the evening, or in firelight.

> A lot of people have a terrible conception of what proper white is.

Color is a perceptual phenomenon that is not independent of surroundings and is especially tricky when you're talking about emission. Just as a piece of white paper in a candle-lit room is very different to a piece of white paper outdoors in sunlight, what is perceived as white on a TV can differ greatly depending on the room it is in or even what else is displayed on-screen.

Rather than insulting people's conception of what "proper white" is, perhaps consider that it's not quite as simple as you think.

Are you calibrating the TV to 5000k when they expect 6000k?

6500K is what one should be calibrating for. A TV straight from the shop in some cases is more like 7500 or 8000K or even more (well into the blue range)

Most content is mastered for this 6500K as that is what the D65 standard is and the tv/film standards like Rec709 and Rec2020 use D65.

There are also cultural differences, too. Asian companies preferred colder whites, while our US customer wanted a warmer white. We were told this made the different skin tones more attractive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com