On Mon, 2010-02-08 at 21:43 -0500, Peter ciccariello wrote:
>
> Thank you for that Angel, fascinating
Many thanks for links and comments which I will follow up but first I
need to post this before I lose/forget it. (And too late, I lost the
URL)
Anyway, there may be another historic inflexion with colour dated around
the 1990s and this connects with the advent of colour computer screens
and particularly LCD screens, which also includes LCD television
screens. Basically, these screens vary widely in colour rendition and
cannot be calibrated, at the consumer level. The screen on my budget
Toshiba laptop is biased very much toward blue and cannot be corrected,
as for most laptops. (What you get is what you see. Enough to change
brown to blue, that much, I kid you not.)
So what has happened is a move, or one could say fashion, which values
highly saturated bright and contrasty colour, especially with
photography. Another example, the older lenses on my Mamiya TLRs dated
around the 1960s have a far softer more muted subtle sort of colour (the
sort of colour you want to eat) whereas the current APO colour corrected
KL lens I use on the Mamiya RB67 is far more contrasty and saturated and
this can be pushed even further by using polarising filters and
graduated filters etc. (This is a top shelf lens so you cannot get
better, but which ever way, this fashion for high saturation colour, if
that makes sense, to which lens design moved.)
This high contrast saturated colour gets around the problem of the
variations in colour rendition of LCD screens and consumer level
screens. A monitor I can colour correct would cost almost a thousand
bucks, where I am. Not exactly consumer level prices.
Anyway, trust this gets at what I am saying. The other interesting thing
is this cannot be explained by technological determinism. (The renewal
of fixed capital, hence the current long term financial crisis may have
more to do with it.)
My CRT monitor has given up the ghost and bit the dust, so am stuck with
this laptop monitor like most consumers. (Not wealthy enough for a new
monitor.) However, the difference is huge between an accurate CRT
monitor and my laptop in colour rendition, if that adds to the
explanation.
PS the design requirements of digital lenses is rather interesting also,
since it involves more then high saturation and contrast.
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