Philips LP2PB201CS - Manual (Page 27)

What’s behind
This last section of the User’s guide introduces you to the theory of color perception
and describes how your monitor can display color images.
It briefly explains also the limitations of a traditional CRT display system and the
innovations of the Cyberscreen ® technology.
Color basics
Surprisingly, color as such does not exist in nature.
What happens is that human eye is sensitive to different frequencies of the
Electromagnetic Radiation which we call light.
The fact that light is the source of color was demonstrated by Isaac Newton in 1666
with the so called ‘prism experiment’: he experienced that a beam of sunlight pas­
sing through a glass prism was broken up into a rainbow made of all the visible
colors. Further to that, he passed the resulting rainbow of light through a second
prism and found that the array of colors was reassembled into the original white light
beam.
As a conclusion of the experiment, it was demonstrated that white light is made up
of and can be reproduced by a mix of colored lights.
According to the color theory fundamentals concerning transmitted light, just the
Red, Green and Blue colors are required to create white light, and it is demonstra­
ted that by varying the intensity of these colors the whole color spectrum can be
reproduced.
For this reason, Red, Green and Blue color are defined as Additive Primary Colors.
20 Appendix A