Technically it doesn’t display yellow at all. In fact, yellow never exists during the entire process. It displays red and green and that activates the red and green cells in your eyes and makes your brain think it saw yellow.
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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It’s exactly analogous to an audio three-band graphic equalizer: if you were deaf and could only detect sound by looking at the equalizer display, you couldn’t distinguish between someone playing through the full scale and someone playing a single three-note chord while adjusting the volumes of the low, mid, and high notes.
Maybe if the EQ display had only three bands.
three-band graphic equalizer
Reading. It truly is fundamental.
Just remember that colours don’t exist - it’s just bits of light that a object doesn’t absorb bouncing back towards our eyes. Our brain then tries to process it.
Now let's talk about reality itself, and the consciousness you think you are using to observe it
Consciousness is the only thing in the universe that I'm absolutely certain is not an illusion.
Lots of philosophers disagree on this one, it's a contentious issue.
Multi-sensory feedback (seeing and touching/tasting/smelling it) for confimation. Which is why we have that instinct.
Your head is really gonna hurt when you read about printer ink and printing presses.
CMYK ftw!
It was definitely strange to learn that mixing all colors of light together makes white light while mixing all paint colors together makes black paint.
One process adds frequencies, the other substracts them. Paint colors are "the frequency that gets not absorbed".
Magenta isn’t even a real color. Your brain made it up.
Your brain made it up.
Well, yeah, but our brains make up every color. Our experiences of color are nothing more than a facet of our brains' interpretations of light information. It's all in our heads.
Magenta is a primary color (not red). You can't mix non-magenta red paint with blue paint to get purple.
There was a push back when HD was kinda new for 4-color TVs. I guess it would just reprocess 3-color data inputs into 4-color output or something. It seemed to die down when 4k caught on as the "next thing"
Yeah, that always seemed like a marketing gimmick not based on any science to me
You see only three colors too.
Sharp Quarttron displays use yellow pixels.
I always thought it was crazy to wonder what the qualia of colors we can't see but other animals can is. It's sort of like being a cat or some other animal with limited color vision and trying to imagine what humans see. How would you prove to a cat that those colors exist?
I've wondered the same about dogs' sensitive sense of smell. What's that like?
How would you prove to a cat that those colors exist?
A spectrum test.
Show a human red fading to infrared, or purple fading to ultraviolet, next to cameras that can detect them in false color. Those are colors we can't see, yet you can see they're there.
Theoretically, it'd be the same for a cat or dog.
Colors don’t actually exist physically. They are a creation of the mind.
Colors are physical wavelengths of light within a spectrum between UV and IR. WTF are you talking about.
Colors don't exist in the physical world. Yellow is just how our brain intreprets a certain wavelenght of light. The qualia of it exists only in your consciousness.
I’m a physicist and no, color is not a physical property of light. Color is a subjective experience created by our mind in response to electrical signals from our eyes.
There's a great old Vsauce video that goes over something like this but even crazier to think about: "is your red the same as my red?". How can you know if your red is the same color as what someone else calls red? We could both be looking at different colors, but we both call it red. Even crazier, how do you explain colors to someone born blind?
As a kid messing around with MSPaint or similar programs, I always wondered why there were never any good yellows. They always seemed to offer a yellowish Brown or a light orange, but never a nice bright yellow like you would find in crayons or paint.
That was just your poorly calibrated display.
On the topic of messing around in Paint, there's something really cool you can do assuming you have a display with normal pixels.
Make a new paint document and color the left half perfectly red and the right half perfectly blue (#FF0000 and #0000FF). Make sure the colors are touching in the middle. If you look really close at the place the colors touch, there will be a tiny little black gap. If you do the opposite, with red on the right and blue on the left, the gap will not appear.
This is, of course, because of the physical layout of the pixels with R on the left and B on the right. By putting red on the left and blue on the right, we make the biggest possible subpixel dark zone.
I have no idea if this is related, or why it happens, but I've noticed if you draw red and blue lines on a black background, it will create a 3D-like depth. I can't remember which is which but one of the two colors looks like it's further away than the other.
Colors aren’t physical. There is no way to measure color. We can measure frequency, wavelength, or energy. So there isn’t any light that is yellow at all. There is light, or combinations of light, that we perceive to be yellow but that is simply a construction of the mind.
There's no strictly defined set of wavelengths for yellow. But you could pick a random wavelength and as long as most people say it's yellow, that's a yellow wavelength.
Yellow is between 590 and 610nm.
You can call it whatever you want but color isn’t a physical property of light. It is a construction of the mind. You claim a certain wavelength is yellow. A computer display can show a combination of red and green pixels that we perceive to be the same shade of yellow even though the original yellow wavelength isn’t present at all. Color isn’t from the light itself but from our mind.
Correct. You can't measure yellow, you can only classify yellow.
In the same way we classify all sorts of things. Types of planets. Types of animals. Races of people.
But that doesn't mean you can say there's no such thing as yellow light. That's like saying there's no such thing as dogs because there's no Internet dog property to measure.
Semi-Subjective classification exists within science and within our language. It is a real thing. And so there IS such a thing as yellow light.
The color yellow subjectively exists. Like I said at the beginning, color is a product of the mind. Objectively, as in is it directly measurable, light has no color. Physics deals with objective measurements.
Objectively yellow is between 590 and 610nm.
More bad news, there are displays that are RYGB, made by Sharp.
I don’t see how a RYGB monitor is bad news.
How does one objectively measure color?
If color is in light then why do people see yellow from an RGB monitor when no yellow light is present? If color is a physical property of light how do we see color? Do the chemicals in our cones see/respond to color? How? How is color detected by chemicals in our eye transmitted to the brain? Does electricity also support color? If so, how?