Abstract

In order to quantify the perceived sharpness of blue color, a Landolt-C (a ring with a gap of 1.25 minutes of arc in visual angle) was rendered in blue at randomly chosen orientations. The observers' perception of the Landolt-C was termed as "highly sharp" if they reported its orientation correctly for at least 80% of the presentations. All displays contained a saturated yellow background, so as to isolate the blue cone system. When the Landolt-C was preceded by either no field or by a red or green filled circle, at least 100 ms were needed for a highly sharp perception. Contrary to our expectations, when a blue field preceded the blue Landolt-C, a highly sharp perception resulted, even at display durations as brief as 50 to 67 ms. We believe that this novel finding has implications for high definition television (HDTV) and graphic visualization methods, which have incorrectly assumed, until now, that blue color always yields a poor spatio-temporal resolution.

© 1992 Optical Society of America