JIMWICh: Yes, yes, yes. My color vision isn’t as bad as yours (00FF00 and FFFF00 look different to me) but I fully agree with your description. Any color with a strong component is fine but weak ones just aren’t there. The darker the base color the more of a factor this is.
A couple more effects I’ve noticed and I’ll throw out there:
The smaller the sample of color the harder it is for me to deal with.
With a reference key I can decode colors that I can’t decode otherwise. I can read (although I have long since forgotten them) resistor color codes with a card next to the resistor. Merely having the card elsewhere in my vision isn’t enough. A card won’t let me read capacitor codes, though. (Resistor codes are bands. Capacitor codes are dots.)
How about “band pass” or “band stop”, or “3rd order band pass” or “interference filter” or “Chebyshev filter” or “dichroic filter” or “dielectric stack” or really any other accurate term?
“Digital” implies the glasses sample the incoming light via some kind of analog to digital process, and then then perform an operation on the digitised data, and then emit the processed image. The term “Digital” implies that the glasses need batteries to operate.
Of course, the pedantic panchromat person is not your target audience, but still…
I question the validity of this product’s claims. In the absence of any appropriately rigorous tests, and in particular double-blind studies, I am profoundly suspicious that this is nothing more than an expensive pair of sunglasses. The technique that they are using might work, but I suspect strongly it depends on the degree to which the individual is capable of registering the colours in question.
I would want to see a lot more science around this before sinking hundreds of dollars on a pair.
So for me, a guy whose career, conversation and clothing don’t depend on accurate identification of color names, $600 is too steep.
But these glasses really do work. They clearly help you distinguish colors, detect reds and greens, and restore the richness of the world you’ve been missing. They’ve brought me at least a few moments of genuine, breath-catching wonder. And it’s joyous to know that if it’s ever important enough, somewhere out there, I can lay my hands on an item that will let me see the real world of color.
They’re frankly pretty amazing. It’s a case-by-case thing, I’m sure, but I’ve been loving them. My first day wearing them, on my way out after putting them on the first time, I just stood and stared across the street for a bit, there was a tree in front of a brick wall, and I was impressed at how the green of the leaves stood out against the red of the brick. Getting in my car to drive home, I saw some poppies in a front lawn, and wow, they were orange as all get out. Then I came to my first traffic light, where I literally said “whoa, that light is hella green”
I drove straight to my local rose garden and where normally I’ve preferred blue and yellow colors in flowers, now I understood why red flowers are cool, they’re not as hidden as they seemed to me before. I was so impressed by the different shades of green I was seeing and the way red flowers looked against them that I (mostly) ignored the topless photoshoot that was going on at the time.
I’ve since noticed red flowers in trees I’ve seen many times before with no idea they had flowers, and some other neat stuff. In all, they really make the world more colorful. I still find myself waiting at a crosswalk, just looking at the colors and going “whoa” until I go “whoa, I missed my turn to cross, oh well. MAN that light is yellow.”
Oh yeah, the narrowband filtering thing: apparently my turn signal lights on my dash are pretty narrow band, they basically disappear when I’m wearing the glasses.
