One of the most explosive markets in the past three years has been the growth of the imemet. It has been said that a new domain name is purchased abom every two minmes. This equates to abom 260,000 new web sites each year! Bm something is missing! Did you know that even though most color monitors can display over 16 million colors, only 216 colors appear similar when viewed with browsers on differera platforms? To make matters even worse, most of these colors don't even match. And when you try printing these colors on a color printer, your choices are even more limited. In a few years, personal digital assistants such as the Palm Pilot will most probably incorporate color into their displays. As the years go on, people will demand more and more from products. The time has come to figure om exactly what can be done abom this color issue.

To begin, let's familiarize ourselves with some basic knowledge. Computer monitors use groups of pixels to display colors. Each group of pixels is made up of three differera color pixels. There is a Red pixel, a Green pixel, and a Blue pixel. By mixing the intensity of these pixels, computers can display many differera colors. This system is know as RGB for Red Green Blue. And computers use this model because the human eye works very similarly to this model. Both monitors and televisions emit light.

On the other hand, most printed images absorb light. Thus primers and priming presses use the CMYK color model when priming in full color. It stands for Cyan (a blue color), Magema (the closest thing to red), Yellow, and blacK. These colors were chosen long ago because they do a good job at represeming what we see in the real world. Each of these colors is considered a 'Reflective' color. When light from the sun or a light bulb hits an object such as green grass, all of the light waves are absorbed by the grass except the green waves. These waves are reflected and picked up by our eyes. The CMYK colors work much the same way. A page primed with Yellow ink absorbs a lot of the cyan and magema light rays but very little yellow light waves. Thus, what you see is yellow page. A page printed with both yellow and cyan appears to be green (yellow and blue make green). The black ink absorbs all visible light waves. The important thing to understand is that this is so differert from how a monitor works. On a monitor, light is being emitted through the screen directly imo our eyes, whereas with prim, the light can only be absorbed and reflected.

This is one of the big deals about color on the Intemet. Even more surprising is that computers with different operating systems or even different programs imerpret RGB differently. This means that a red color on one computer my appear to be violet on another computer. We cannot accept this any longer. A standard method needs to be developed to incorporate any and all kinds color methods. This standard method is curremly lacking in our society.

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