Why Your Monitor Can Never Show All Colors: The Geometric Impossibility of RGB Displays
In 1931, a group of scientists gathered in Cambridge, England, at a meeting of the International Commission on Illumination (CIE). They had spent years analyzing data from color matching experiments conducted by William David Wright and John Guild, who had asked human observers to match monochromatic colors by mixing red, green, and blue lights. The result of that meeting—the CIE 1931 color space—revealed something unsettling: the shape of human color perception is fundamentally incompatible with the triangle-based color systems used by every display today. ...