To this point all the colors we’ve discussed have been “natural” colors. Colors that appear in the sky, in the Earth, in living things, both plants and animals, and even on other planets. However, these days a lot of the colors we see come from the electronic devices in our hands and in our homes. Whether it is a smart phone, a television, a tablet, a smart watch, or the screens in our electronic cars, the common feature in that all these devices effectively convert electrical energy into light – light that can contain millions of colors. In writing this chapter, I’m reminded of the dozens of books sitting on the bookshelf in my office that are hopefully out of date when it comes to electronic devices. The pace of technology evolution is truly mind blowing. In the middle class house I grew up in, we had one color television (not HD, not cable, not satellite, just a TV) and a handful of old black-and-white televisions in various states of disrepair. My father was an electrical engineer, so no electronic device in our house ever got thrown away. While our family was a little unusual, it was not uncommon for people to have television sets for more than 10 years. There were electronics stores (like Radio Shack) that sold spare parts (like transistor tubes and capacitors) so devices could stay in service a long time. When I went off to grad school I inherited the old color TV and was crushed when one day after almost 20 years of service it stopped working. Things changed dramatically with the advent of display technologies in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. It became cheaper to manufacture televisions, easier to incorporate color, and the technology was easily scalable to making large televisions. This led to televisions appearing in homes all around the world, and with that an explosion of color. Soon that expanded to other electronic devices such as laptops with color displays, smart phones, tablets, and color displays in our automobiles. The pace of change was even more dramatic. The latest study I can find says the average life expectancy of a television is four to six years. That’s not when the actual device becomes non-functional, but it’s the time period when the device is typically replaced for a new television that is faster, bigger, more colorful, and with additional features. Obviously, this incredible computational power along with the colorful display of information at our fingertips has changed our species forever. There are things we can do now that are enabled by these devices that we could not imagine just 10 to 20 years ago. I now hike with a smart phone that has a color topographical map that tracks my GPS location. I take full-color photos of the sky, the flowers, the leaves, the birds, the mountains in the distance and rocks beneath my feet. With an app on my phone I can identify the plants, insects, and animals that I encounter (even the scat!). It will almost certainly be the case that we will be capable of things 10 to 20 years from now that we cannot even conceive of right now.

Color from Displays

章节
发表日期：

2025年

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David Cann

摘要

To this point all the colors we’ve discussed have been “natural” colors. Colors that appear in the sky, in the Earth, in living things, both plants and animals, and even on other planets. However, these days a lot of the colors we see come from the electronic devices in our hands and in our homes. Whether it is a smart phone, a television, a tablet, a smart watch, or the screens in our electronic cars, the common feature in that all these devices effectively convert electrical energy into light – light that can contain millions of colors. In writing this chapter, I’m reminded of the dozens of books sitting on the bookshelf in my office that are hopefully out of date when it comes to electronic devices. The pace of technology evolution is truly mind blowing. In the middle class house I grew up in, we had one color television (not HD, not cable, not satellite, just a TV) and a handful of old black-and-white televisions in various states of disrepair. My father was an electrical engineer, so no electronic device in our house ever got thrown away. While our family was a little unusual, it was not uncommon for people to have television sets for more than 10 years. There were electronics stores (like Radio Shack) that sold spare parts (like transistor tubes and capacitors) so devices could stay in service a long time. When I went off to grad school I inherited the old color TV and was crushed when one day after almost 20 years of service it stopped working. Things changed dramatically with the advent of display technologies in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. It became cheaper to manufacture televisions, easier to incorporate color, and the technology was easily scalable to making large televisions. This led to televisions appearing in homes all around the world, and with that an explosion of color. Soon that expanded to other electronic devices such as laptops with color displays, smart phones, tablets, and color displays in our automobiles. The pace of change was even more dramatic. The latest study I can find says the average life expectancy of a television is four to six years. That’s not when the actual device becomes non-functional, but it’s the time period when the device is typically replaced for a new television that is faster, bigger, more colorful, and with additional features. Obviously, this incredible computational power along with the colorful display of information at our fingertips has changed our species forever. There are things we can do now that are enabled by these devices that we could not imagine just 10 to 20 years ago. I now hike with a smart phone that has a color topographical map that tracks my GPS location. I take full-color photos of the sky, the flowers, the leaves, the birds, the mountains in the distance and rocks beneath my feet. With an app on my phone I can identify the plants, insects, and animals that I encounter (even the scat!). It will almost certainly be the case that we will be capable of things 10 to 20 years from now that we cannot even conceive of right now.