Many of you will have seen the Scribble Pen which uses a colour sensor to detect colours. The sensor is embedded at the end of the pen opposite the nib. The pen then mixes the required coloured ink (cyan, magenta, yellow, white and black) for drawing, using small refillable ink cartridges that fit inside its body. The device can hold 100,000 unique colours in its internal memory and can reproduce over 16 million unique colours.

But wait. Don’t think that means you will be able to use the pen to write in 16 million different colours. You won’t. A typical phone screen can display about 16 million unique combinations of RGB (red, green and blue). But many of the RGB combinations are indistinguishable. Open up powerpoint and make two squares. Set the RGB values of one to [10 220 10] and of the other to [10 220 11]. I would be amazed if you could really tell the difference between them. And anyone who has read much of my blog will know that I believe that if two colours look the same then they are the same. So the pen might be able to create 16 million combinations of cyan, magenta, yellow, white, and black – but that doesn’t mean 16 million different colours.

The second problem is that just because your pen can grab a colour (using its sensor) doesn’t mean it can create it. There are lots of colours out there in the world that are outside the colour gamut of an ink-based system (even one using five primaries – cyan, magenta, yellow, white and black).

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2647129/Forget-crayons-Multicolour-pen-lets-pick-colour-draw-16-million-shades.html#ixzz35gJ0racJ
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