Quattron? More like Craptron.

Sharp has recently introduced a new TV called the Aquos Quattron that utilizes their brand new quad pixel technology. As it stands, all conventional monitors and tvs use pixels of three colors, Red, Green, and Blue (you can tell if you get really really really close). By varying the intensity of each of these colors, we are able to create millions of other colors in the full spectrum of visible light. Sharp's technology is different in that it adds a fourth pixel color, Yellow.

As most of us know from grade school, you can make just about any color of finger paint by mixing red, blue, and yellow finger paint, including green. So it stands to reason that yellow should be a better choice than green to begin with, and certainly should enable you to make better colors. On a pure permutational basis, with each color ranging in value from 0 to 255, adding a fourth pixel (regardless of color) brings your total from 256^3 to 256^4, which is a lot more colors.

Now here's the problem that any theatre majors may already suspect. For whatever reason, when you mix light, you get results quite unlike when you mix paint. For example, when you mix red and green paint, you get a sort of poopy brown. However, when you mix red and green light, you get pure yellow. The true reason has to do with the physiology of the eye and the way your brain interprets information. When you mix paint, you're actually mixing bits of red things with bits of green things, which ends up with one big pile of poopy brown. However, when you mix light, instead of interpreting it as "red + green," your brain interprets it as "halfway between green and red," which, believe it or not, is yellow.

The reason we interpret it that way is that our eyes don't actually see yellow, nor do they see most colors, for that matter. The color-sensing cells in our eyes only detect 3 wavelengths, which are Red (564nm), Green (534nm) and, you guessed it, Blue (420nm). The color our brain interprets as being yellow is actually "equal parts green and red."

So basically, even though adding a fourth pixel mathematically enhances the number of colors that can be displayed on a TV, its physiologically useless, as we can't see the difference between "actually yellow" and "red + green."  This is not to mention the fact that we could no longer graph colors in a 3-dimensional space, but would have to move to 4-dimensional, which is not only nigh-on-impossible to visualize, but just plain dumb. A much better way of enhancing image depth would be to move from 8-bit color to 16-bit color, which makes each color scalable from 0-65535, rather than 0-255.

Moral of the story, don't buy into Sharp's crappy ripoff tv idea. It's a waste of money and an insult to our intelligence.