ReviewTheLight: Imalent SA04

[Bigmac_79]

@djozz

Thanks for all the answers BM, that explains a lot . The grating slide looks useful!

The only thing that I do not understand is that you say that a webcam corrects for the human eye sensitivity, so that we can see the image correctly. If it does that, the image when we look at it is ‘filtered’ twice, first by the software, then by our eyes. What in my understanding the camera+display should do is reproduce reality (without correction) as well as possible so that we see as little difference as possible between image and reality.

You’ve brought up a good point, but unfortunately it’s moving into a realm I know less about. This has to do with the display properties of your video driver I believe—the part of your computer responsible for deciding what brightness values to send to the RGB pixels in your monitor. I can’t speak with certainty here, but I’ll give my best understanding, and someone who knows more about computers can correct me if necessary. I believe the video driver takes into account the properties of your specific screen to take the data from whatever you’re doing on your computer and display it in such a way as your eyes will see the color intended by your programs. So, the webcam first has to give the computer data about what colors the user should see, then the video driver will translate that into the light that needs to be emitted by the screen to give your eyes the correct colors.

While I don’t understand the whole process there, I do know that it works, because when I look at a webcam picture the colors look pretty much as they should

[Bigmac_79]

@djozz

…What in my understanding the camera+display should do is reproduce reality (without correction) as well as possible so that we see as little difference as possible between image and reality.

This certainly does strike me as the simplest way to design a webcam-displaying computer, but in this case the webcam is not the only thing our computers display, and most of the color data on our computers is in terms of what colors the user should see, so the webcam data must be presented accordingly.