5 ms·

> With screen color, you have only one finish, and that's whatever the user's monitor happens to have Screens have a huge number of "finishes" because calibrat

> With screen color, you have only one finish, and that's whatever the user's monitor happens to have Screens have a huge number of "finishes" because calibration varies wildly between devices. It's gotten better over the years but still few users have screens that accurately reproduce 100% of sRGB.

itp 11y ago
That's true, but I think the point is that a single screen only has one "finish" (at any given point in time?).
542458 11y ago
You're right. I should have said "With screen color, you have only one choice of finish, and that's whatever the user's monitor happens to have".
jacobolus 11y ago
> few users have screens that accurately reproduce 100% of sRGB. All currently selling Apple computers (at least phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops, I’m not sure about the watches) are extremely close to sRGB. So that’s a considerable proportion of computer/mobile device users. Other vendors’ devices have a much spottier record, but matching sRGB is by no means an impossible goal. More generally, screens can be precisely characterized (either at the factory or by end users) and color management software can pipe pixel colors through a lookup table on their way to the display, so that at least in-gamut colors appear correctly. Sadly Windows and Linux didn’t support proper color management at an OS level for many years, so lots of software on those platforms still doesn’t do it correctly. And web browsers on all platforms punt on correctly doing color management for CSS colors, with the excuse of matching non-color-managed Flash. Even more unfortunately, neither iOS nor Android has any color management whatsoever. iOS gets around this by making sure all the displays have nearly identical color (at least on recent machines), but on Android getting accurate color is a crapshoot. Then there are televisions, for most of which color is a complete joke.

itp 11y ago

That's true, but I think the point is that a single screen only has one "finish" (at any given point in time?).

542458 11y ago

You're right. I should have said "With screen color, you have only one choice of finish, and that's whatever the user's monitor happens to have".

jacobolus 11y ago

> few users have screens that accurately reproduce 100% of sRGB. All currently selling Apple computers (at least phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops, I’m not sure about the watches) are extremely close to sRGB. So that’s a considerable proportion of computer/mobile device users. Other vendors’ devices have a much spottier record, but matching sRGB is by no means an impossible goal. More generally, screens can be precisely characterized (either at the factory or by end users) and color management software can pipe pixel colors through a lookup table on their way to the display, so that at least in-gamut colors appear correctly. Sadly Windows and Linux didn’t support proper color management at an OS level for many years, so lots of software on those platforms still doesn’t do it correctly. And web browsers on all platforms punt on correctly doing color management for CSS colors, with the excuse of matching non-color-managed Flash. Even more unfortunately, neither iOS nor Android has any color management whatsoever. iOS gets around this by making sure all the displays have nearly identical color (at least on recent machines), but on Android getting accurate color is a crapshoot. Then there are televisions, for most of which color is a complete joke.