Metamerism and Multi-Primary Displays

with three additive primary colors (R,G,B), new displays are emerging with more than three primaries. Multi-primary displays try to achieve two goals: to expand the color gamut available on the screen and to extend screen contrast and brightness to achieve the range of colors and highlights renderable in commercial (film-based) cinema. Meeting these objectives entails challenges, however. For example, as yet there is not even an agreedupon number to quantify color gamut. In this article, we will look at one aspect of the colorrendering challenge – metamerism – whereby different light spectra have the same color appearance under the same circumstances. For this article, we distinguish the number of primaries pd in a display (a hardware function) from the number of variables pc used to control that display (generally a software function).