[Leica] Fourth color

[lrzeitlin at gmail.com (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

I just saw an advertisement noting that Sharp has added yellow as a fourth
color to its LCD TV screens. The claim is that this gives a brighter and
more accurate color rendition. We must remember that the three colors used
in the Bayer filter and in most color films is the bare minimum necessary to
give the illusion of full color. Three colors are insufficient to represent
the entire perceptual color space. The human eye has at least five
photoreceptors peaking at different colors. Modern ink jet printers use up
to six different shades of ink for color fidelity. Precision printers,
especially those printing art books and other publications where color is
important, use more than six colors. The Warner Packaging Corp., in
Bridgeport, CT, a firm printing the boxes for Revlon hair colors, uses up to
eleven different colored inks in its presses. Apparently women are very
particular about the exact shade of color shown on the hair dye boxes.

This leads to the obvious question. Now that the resolution battle in
digital cameras is almost over, I mean, who needs more than 20MP resolution
in a 35 mm sized frame, will the next competitive fight be to increase the
number of sensor colors for better color fidelity? It happened in film, Fuji
vs. Kodak, why not in digital cameras.

Larry Z