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colorblind displays

cheap
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Build monitors and televisions which only have two electron guns and two flavors of phosphor. Sell them to the colorblind at a lower price which reflects the lesser manufacturing cost.

Perhaps these could be refurbished normal displays which have lost one of their guns. (I've seen a few monitors fail this way.)

egnor, Mar 07 2001

Info on colorblindness http://members.aol....colorvsn/color2.htm
There are, in fact, several different types. [PotatoStew, Mar 07 2001, last modified Oct 05 2004]

test yourself... http://www.umds.ac....lindness/plate1.htm
...to see if you're colour vision deficient [mihali, Sep 26 2002, last modified Oct 05 2004]


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       Would there really be that great a difference in price (and a large enough market of colorblind people) to make it worthwhile?
PotatoStew, Mar 08 2001
  

       10% of men are colorblind, right? That's a pretty big market.
egnor, Mar 08 2001
  

       There are different types of colorblindness though... wouldn't you end up needing to make some devices with only RG guns, some with GB, and some with RB? Or am I misunderstanding how colorblindness works?
PotatoStew, Mar 08 2001
  

       What's the difference between watching a TV several colors of which you can't discerne and watching a TV that is missing those colors all together, except that it's more annoying for others in the room?
centauri, Mar 08 2001
  

       The difference is that you paid less for the second TV.
egnor, Mar 08 2001
  

       You still see the shading the colors add. If you subtract one-third of the color, it'll look -really- strange. No white, for one thing; white is made up of red, green and blue. Yellow is made up of red and green, and without one or the other of those, you wouldn't get that, either. Shading of the remaining colors would be off, as well, as few colors are one single phosphor.
StarChaser, Mar 08 2001
  

       It will look strange to normal people, but it should look normal to colorblind people. It might require some signal processing to rebalance RGB into GB or whatever.
egnor, Mar 08 2001
  

       Since there are differing types and degrees of colorblindness, I really think it would look normal to only a very small percentage of people. Plus, StarChaser is right... since you couldn't create white, there would be no way to reproduce the color that is seen as white in the real world (probably applies to most other colors too). The picture on the screen might look *more* normal to a colorblind person, but it wouldn't look identical to a similar image in real life.   

       And if signal processing is intended to compensate for this, wouldn't the cost of additional signal processing cut into the (still undetermined amount of) savings from having only two guns?
PotatoStew, Mar 08 2001
  

       The simple signal processing (mixing, really) is cheap, and practically free given that modern displays make heavy use of digital signal processing anyway.   

       There are differing types and degrees of colorblindness, but the most common varieties should cover enough people to make a viable market.   

       I don't think your arguments about the reproduction of white make sense. The "white" of a monitor screen is actually very, very different from the "white" of a sheet of paper in the sun; we don't perceive (much) difference because our own vision is very limited (most of us are only trichromatic; there may be a few tetrachromats, but nobody has anything like full-spectrum vision). Colorblind people would similarly see the "white" of a reduced monitor (which wouldn't look white at all to a person with normal vision) as indistinguishable from any other white.   

       Note that human tetrachromats (if they exist) are in the opposite boat; for them, monitors and even paints do not faithfully represent color, and a white TV screen is a different color from a white piece of paper. These people would require *more* expensive displays (as well as all of the image capture and distribution mechanism behind them, from TV cameras and film all the way through), and in any case there can't be more than a handful of them, so unlike the colorblind they don't represent much of a marketing opportunity.
egnor, Mar 08 2001
  

       I'm pretty sure there are human tetrachromats, but not very many. (Also, their extra color is very close to one of the colors everyone else has, so most objects would be only slightly affected by this problem.)   

       However, all goldfish are tetrachromats. Therefore, after we genetically engineer intelligent goldfish and they rise up and become our masters, we will have to redesign all our video systems for four channels of color. Best to get started now!
wiml, Mar 08 2001
  

       Early Technicolor films used a two-strip process, typically using reddish-magenta and greenish-cyan. The resulting color pictures have a "dated" look to them, but actually look pretty decent given that they're almost 75 years old.
supercat, Mar 08 2001
  

       On a related note, how about having a display card support a 16-bit color mode with 8 bits of (red + 1/2 blue) and 8 bits of (green + 1/2 blue)?
supercat, Mar 08 2001
  

       Even if you're correct about the lack of difference in perceived color between the set and the real world, I'm still not sure that I believe that the 2 gun sets would be cheap enough compared with a normal set to warrant doing this. Especially when you consider that the set would be useless if the colorblind buyer ever has guests over to watch TV (unless he or she only knows other colorblind people).
PotatoStew, Mar 08 2001
  

       I'm pretty sure that 'colorblind' people do not actually not SEE the colors, they have difficulty distinguishing between them. <I have a similar problem. I am not colorblind, but I have 'cat eyes'. I see colors less vividly but see incredibly well in the dark. Sometimes I have difficulty with red and green that are near the same brightness> White is still white. You'd still see it as strange if a third of the color making it up was missing...
StarChaser, Mar 10 2001
  

       Why can't we just sell 'em Black & White TV set?? They're cheap. (Do you have "recycling-purpose" in mind? maybe?)
jackson127, Sep 26 2002
  

       sigh...when will people learn? i am colour vision deficient, not colour blind. i still see colours just like you do, it's just that i confuse red for green and vice versa once in a while. when i found out it ruined my dream of becoming an airline pilot.   

       see link.
mihali, Sep 26 2002
  

       Being colorblind myself, and knowing a bit about how it works. I must tell you that only a verry small number of colorblind are 100% colorblind in one of the colors mentioned. Over 99.99% of the colorblinds are only partialy blind to either red or green. Taking out the entire component will not go unnoticed.
lucason, May 30 2003
  


 

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