Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!seismo!sundc!newstop!sun!concertina!fiddler
From: fiddler@concertina.Sun.COM (Steve Hix)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Monochrome, greyscale or what?
Message-ID: <132517@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 5 Mar 90 17:34:07 GMT
References: <29613@brunix.UUCP> <1990Feb16.231217.27252@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu> <20532@netnews.upenn.edu>
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Lines: 22

In article <20532@netnews.upenn.edu>, meuchen@grad2.cis.upenn.edu (Paul Eric Menchen) writes:
> >In article <1990Feb16.231217.27252@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu>, kanefsky@umn-cs (Steve Kanefsky) writes:
> >>BTW, I wonder why Apple downplays their monitors by calling them
> >>"monochrome" when they're all capable of at least 16 shades of grey
> 
> The artist and pysicist in me has to be nitpicky here.  Actually,
> monochrome would be one color or perhaps different shades of that one
> color. The color is at a particular wavelength.  Greys, as an artist
> knows, are not color.  They are nuetrals.  The variation of greys are
> a result of different intensities.  In this respect, the Apple
> Monochrome monitors aren't even monochromatic.  They're achromatic.

The photographer/nit-picker part of me (I may be schizophrenic, but I'll
always have each other?) just tripped over "achromatic".

"No color" (achromatic) implies a dead screen.  Make that panchromatic.
Varying the intensity then gives you shades of gray.

------------
"...Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise
anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear
and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded..."   Plato, _Phaedrus_