What colour is this?

By | October 11, 2008

I just spent too much time looking at colour bars on a webpage we were building. The top flash menu versus the bottom div looked different. But the colour codes were the same. I’d been caught out by the viewing-angle dependence of LCD screens.

“Eh?”, you say. Well, it turns out the colour or hue changes significantly on LCD screens as your angle of viewing changes. So colours at the top of the screen look different to colours at the bottom. This is true even over the tiny 9″ of real estate as on my eee pc. To doubly confound my cones the effect gets worse the closer you get to the screen. So by pressing my nose against the screen and squinting at the menu versus the div it looked worse.

Great explanation and example colour swatch.