How to Shop on the Web Without Seeing Red

Abstract

Using the World Wide Web to order goods and services is a rapidly increasing activity. Experience with mail order catalogues has shown that failure of goods to match the catalogue color is a major category of complaint. Ordering colored goods on the web poses even greater challenges. Useful devices to standardise cathode-ray tubes, and other self-luminous displays, are available, but these only address the problem of display set-up. Other relevant problems include the effects of changes in the level of luminance, lack of color constancy of goods with changes in illuminant color, departures from a set of color-matching functions of the spectral sensitivities of acquisition devices, observer metamerism, the effect of the surround on the appearance of the display, and limitations in the gamut and in the resolution of typical displays. The extent to which these factors are likely to be important is discussed, and ways in which some of their effects might be mitigated are considered.