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"This means that potential color accuracy is wasted for reserving these unnecessary colors."

Someone please explain to me what this means.

Certainly file space can be wasted by storing unnecessary data. And I can imagine that color accuracy might be compromised if colors are allowed to stray into the no man's land of imaginary color space.

But, how exactly can color accuracy be "wasted"? Am I missing something?

(Objection cross-posted at Talk:ProPhoto RGB color space)

70.236.225.228 17:57, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, if you take a particular representation of color samples in this color space - let's be specific, 8 bits per sample. That means you have 2**24 different color values. Ideally, you want each color value to be used to represent a real color. However, if as the article claims 8% of those color values cannot ever occur with real world colors, that reduces the number of colors that can be stored by 2**24 * 8%. Since there are real world colors that the eye can see that are already not distinguishable in narrow gamut RGB, wide gamut RGB will have even more real world colors that can be distinguished by eye but have the same representation. So, this is less accurate than other narrow gamut RGB values (so long as the color is in the gamut of both). In this sense, you get less accuracy with the same amount of data, leading to the description of "wasting". Which could probably be improved, but at the cost of much more formality. Notinasnaid 19:11, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Some unregistered Wikipedian wrote at Talk:Violet (color) that 0, 0, 255 in this space is violet, not blue. Anyone able to explain in detail?? Georgia guy 15:04, 15 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That is correct. Look at the lower-left corner of the color triangle. It's all the way down at violet, as opposed to the blue that most tri-chromatic additive spaces use. Historically, violet is not unusual as the name of the additive primary that today we usually call blue. For example, Thomas Young and James Clerk Maxwell used red, green, and violet, because otherwise the color of violet can not be represented. [1] [2] Dicklyon 16:07, 15 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, what's blue?? Georgia guy 16:55, 15 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Who needs to know? Probably around [0, 50, 255], which moves you up the edge toward the green corner a bit. Dicklyon 00:10, 16 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've been looking around for the original source for these numbers and haven't been able to find one -- a lot of pages I've seen just directly cite this page directly, rather than the original source. I've been looking for a source for the original spec, but haven't found one.

The page itself isn't clear if these come from one of the cited sources or not, and I think that the table should be properly cited.

--ClarFonThey (talk) 07:01, 4 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]