Question

I am making a webpage, and using the following HEX color: #494573

Now, what I find really strange is how differently they are drawn between different machines (or monitors?) – I just bought a mac, so it’s brand new, and it looks more like violet, but if I open the same webpage on ubuntu, it’s more like blueish. I know this might be a screen thing but, how does one discern?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Let’s take an absurd comparison.

Imagine you’re looking at it on three monitors:

1. A monitor with brightness and contrast set high.
2. A black-and-white monitor, with bright set low.
3. A green-and-black monitor!

It should be obvious that they’ll give a completely different view. So obvious you won’t even have thought of it.

Now to be a bit more realistic, look at a plain coloured background in an LCD laptop monitor (the cheaper the better for this experiment) and see if you can see a gradient that clearly isn’t in the actual background.

Now go into a television store and tell the seller that colour clarity is important to you and money is no object. He will tell you lots more about how some screens are better than others, than you will ever want to know (and be really angry when you explain this is just an experiment in response to an SO post).

Even with the same screen, lighting conditions will affect the colour you see. People who need to really guarantee consistent colour in their work-setup block out windows and tape lamps into position.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_management and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile will tell you more. Each OS has a way (sometimes over-ridden by a custom control panel for a given graphics card) to adjust the colour calibration to give a result more like that intended by the producer of the image/video/webpage/etc.