The Color of Gold

The colors Gold, Turquoise and Violet are among the most difficult to render accurately on a traditional Red Green Blue monitor and TVs. Gold is often assigned an RGB value of (255, 244, 0), which on my monitor anyway, looks mostly yellow.

This is largely because part of the chromaticity of gold lies outside the gamut of most RGB monitors. In the following diagrams, the left-most represents all of the colors that can be perceived by the eye, whereas the one on the right shows the sub-set of colors that can generated by a typical RGB monitor.

This triangular sub-set of colors is called the gamut. Monitor gamuts vary slightly by manufacturer, but the one shown above (right) is typical. The true color of gold cannot be shown accurately because some of gold’s colors lie outside the area enclosed by the triangle.

Now, a company called Genoa Color, promises to move out of the ‘iron triangle’ by adding up to three more near-primary colors such as yellow, cyan and magenta (YCM) to the pallette. Genoa claims that “the television picture ..(will have)..truer, more vibrant color and brighter image, looks more like cinema than video”.

The diagram below is a representation of what Genoa is trying to accomplish. The pixels on the left show a typical RGB setup; the cluster of pixels on the right, however, show the effect of adding additional pixel types to render yellow and cyan. While it will not be perfect, these 5 primaries will make ‘gold’ appear more realistic. It is estimated that ‘perfection’, i.e. rendering all colors accurately as per the CIE diagram at the upper left, would require the use of 7-10 primary colors.

Genoa is working with Philips to market 5-color front and rear projection systems based on the above technology. Samsung is also planning on offering a five-color DLP-RPTV, expected in 2005.

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5. Mitsubishi LaserTV — it’ll burn your eyes out!!