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Wavelengths
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this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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Fun fact! Since we (primates) have three cone cell types, we only really see three colours (red, green, blue). The rest are illusions. Some animals, like some fish and birds, have four or five cone cell types.
This means that for animals that have a cone cell type for yellow, a sunflower displayed on an LCD screen will not have the same color as a real sunflower. The screen will show a mixture of red and green (which we perceive as yellow) but it won't actually be yellow.
Mantis shrimps seem to be the champions of this. They have between 12 and 16 different types of cones, spanning into the ultraviolet. They have a very different visual processing system to most animals though, so despite all the cones, they don't seem to synthesise shades between them, so they probably don't have a very vivid image.
They basically have most of visual processing offloaded to cones because of how simplistic their nervous system has to be.
You can actually distinguish colors better than a mantis shrimp.
Turns out a lot of the processing that allows us to distinguish between colors happens in our huge brains. Take that, stupid shrimp!
What they are the champions of, however, is seeing polarized light. Some researchers have modeled cameras off of their eyes to help detent cancer.
It's more complicated than that. Colours are not some discrete things, it's a spectra. Even one colour is a bunch of wavelengths.
So in truth each eye cone of ours perceives a spectrum.
But real sunflowers are (and correct me if I'm wrong) yellow colored, so why LCD screens don't do tue same thing? Is it because they are based upon RGB? If so, that kinda feels like an issue with screens and not with our lack of cones
Yes! We developed screens to suit our eyes. Pixels look like this: https://b2c-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/subpixels-monitor-types.jpg
It's not an issue, it's just that they're built to be viewed by three-cone creatures.
Obligatory "there is a Radiolab episode about this": https://www.radiolab.org/podcast/rippin-the-rainbow-an-even-newer-one
And here is a great video by Steve Mould about cameras and true color: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-DyrBDsKA5s
Just spit ballin': The TVs don't have "yellow" cuz we don't have the cones. TVs are built by humans for the use of other humans. Why would we design them to produce light that we don't have the cones for?
If we all only saw black and white, we wouldn't have developed TVs with color. If we were all blind, we wouldn't have developed TVs at all
Edit: I think this has interesting speculative fiction implications regarding technological development, especially in scifi