ADAM ENGST 22 June 2026

There are colors that I want to show you, but I can’t. They exist in the real world. You probably saw some of them today, but I can’t show them to you on a screen. A digital photograph can’t capture them, and your screen can’t display them. No game you’ve ever played has contained them. Unless you have specialized equipment, they are entirely absent from the digital world.

Moulton’s article is necessarily a bit technical, but he does a good job of explaining why colors in the real world—a butterfly’s wing, a peacock’s plumage, a tropical lagoon, a deciduous forest on a sunny summer afternoon—are so much more visually arresting than images that can be displayed on screen. Apple makes much of its display specs—the Studio Display has support for 1 billion colors with a P3 wide color gamut—but as Moulton shows, the technology involved in mixing red, green, and blue as the three primary screen colors creates a situation where some colors—most of the cyans—simply can’t be reproduced. Read it to understand why your digital photos don’t always fully capture what you saw, and savor the next time you find yourself in the presence of real-world color that no Retina display can deliver.

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