Jon Fairhurst
November 17th, 2011, 12:39 PM
Yesterday, I attended a technical talk that mentioned the XYZ camera from Ikegami. Rather than use RGB color filters, the XYZ camera captures the entire gamut - 100% of the colors available to the human eye.
Here's a translation of the Ikegami page: Google Translate (http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=http://www.ikegami.co.jp/news/detail.html%3Fnews_id%3D545&ei=nVDFTuHLH-HdiAL2gPnTBQ&sa=X&oi=translate&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCMQ7gEwAA&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dikegami%2Bxyz%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26hs%3DJxm%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26prmd%3Dimvnsb)
I saw some test results, and the camera truly captured colors right at the curved ring of the CIE color chart with very small errors compared to those of RGB cameras. In fact, right in the middle of the chart, RGB cams can have extreme color errors, while the XYZ cam was nearly spot on.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/CIExy1931_srgb_gamut.png/240px-CIExy1931_srgb_gamut.png
According to the speaker, the camera is 10-bits linear and it has a fair amount of noise, so it's not going to shoot blockbuster films just yet. But it can capture amazingly accurate colors. For some applications (art, textiles, manufacturing, etc), color accuracy is critically important.
In the same talk, they showed the benefits of adding additional colors to RGB displays to extend the gamut. Again, the results are impressive.
The problem with RGB is that you need negative values to create all of the colors perceivable by the human eye. A filter that sucks green out of the environment has yet to be invented. ;) XYZ filters for displays would have terrible light efficiency. Therefore, additional primaries are the solution for wide gamut displays.
DCI (Digital Cinema Initiative) already stores video in the XYZ colorspace. I wonder how long it will be before we have cameras and displays that can make full use of it.
Here's a translation of the Ikegami page: Google Translate (http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=http://www.ikegami.co.jp/news/detail.html%3Fnews_id%3D545&ei=nVDFTuHLH-HdiAL2gPnTBQ&sa=X&oi=translate&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCMQ7gEwAA&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dikegami%2Bxyz%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26hs%3DJxm%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26prmd%3Dimvnsb)
I saw some test results, and the camera truly captured colors right at the curved ring of the CIE color chart with very small errors compared to those of RGB cameras. In fact, right in the middle of the chart, RGB cams can have extreme color errors, while the XYZ cam was nearly spot on.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/CIExy1931_srgb_gamut.png/240px-CIExy1931_srgb_gamut.png
According to the speaker, the camera is 10-bits linear and it has a fair amount of noise, so it's not going to shoot blockbuster films just yet. But it can capture amazingly accurate colors. For some applications (art, textiles, manufacturing, etc), color accuracy is critically important.
In the same talk, they showed the benefits of adding additional colors to RGB displays to extend the gamut. Again, the results are impressive.
The problem with RGB is that you need negative values to create all of the colors perceivable by the human eye. A filter that sucks green out of the environment has yet to be invented. ;) XYZ filters for displays would have terrible light efficiency. Therefore, additional primaries are the solution for wide gamut displays.
DCI (Digital Cinema Initiative) already stores video in the XYZ colorspace. I wonder how long it will be before we have cameras and displays that can make full use of it.