There is an area of psychology that studies the influence colours have on our psyches, but exhaustive research hasn’t really been done like in other areas. Despite the general lack of research into the psychology of colour, the concept has become a hot topic in marketing, art, design and cinema.  Cinematographers, directors, editors and production designers use specific colours or colour palettes to evoke moods.

We all perceive colours differently, and these perceptions are somewhat subjective. Red may mean angry to some while others see love, for instance. Still, some colour effects, psychologists say, have mostly universal meaning. Colours in the red area of the colour spectrum are known as warm colours and include red, orange, and yellow. These warm colours evoke emotions ranging from feelings of warmth and comfort to feelings of anger and hostility. Colours on the blue side of the spectrum are known as cool colours and include blue, purple, and green. These colours are often described as calm but can also make us feel sadness or indifference. There’s a reason why race cars are red and school buses are yellow.

  It seems today's projectors are in a race to be brighter and brighter without regard to colour quality. BenQ’s mission and core value is to create the most accurate colour through optimal balance of brightness and accurate colour.

So, if filmmakers use colour to manipulate our emotions to enhance our experience in the multiplex, how do we replicate the same feelings at home? Quite simply, we need to see the colours the filmmakers intended us to see. BenQ home theatre projectors carry this credo: “Convey the truest colour and impart the deepest feelings to the viewer.” Our THX and ISF (video calibration) dual-certified engineers deliver 100% Rec. 709 colour gamut for perfect colour consistency. Our top projectors achieve the 100% DCI-P3 wide colour gamut, and only BenQ provides calibration reports, for example the HT3550 has a Delta E performance less than 3 to reproduce authentic colours of Hollywood films. Delta E is a metric for understanding how the human eye perceives colour difference. Basically, Delta E (sometimes written as dE) measures the “distance” between colours. The term delta comes from mathematics, meaning change in a variable or function. The suffix E references the German word Empfindung, which broadly means sensation.

The idea is that a dE of 1.0 is the smallest colour difference the human eye can see. So any dE less than 1.0 is imperceptible and any dE greater than 1.0 is noticeable.

The Delta E rating of BenQ Home Theater projectors means, simply, that our projectors are able to present millions of shades of colour and enable the viewer to experience these as filmmakers intended. The colours they chose to create mood and emotion have their intended effect, and we enjoy the programs as they hoped. 

The Rec. 709 colour standard was created by ITU (International Telecommunication Union) for TV, movie and A/V industries to ensure all HD equipment including displays, DVDs, and Blu-rays use the same colour gamut, resolution, frame rate and video specifications. Rec. 709 uses specific red, green and blue colours and Illuminant D65 (6500k) for the specific white point to build a standardized colour space and reproduce accurate colour gamut and grayscale. All colours blend into white, so it’s important to set the white point accurately. It’s the foundation for the rest of the spectrum to build outward.

DCI-P3 (Digital Cinema Initiative) is a common RGB colour space for digital movie projection and the Hollywood standard. Often referred to as "wide colour gamut," DCI-P3’s range is 26% larger than Rec.709. The standard was also adopted by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE).

DCI-P3 is expected be adopted in television systems and home cinema as a step towards implementation of the significantly wider colour gamut of Rec. 2020, coming next year. </p>  DCI-P3 is especially important in 4K because the 8.3 million pixels in a 4K image can really amplify inconsistencies in the colour gamut. It also set the standard that all 4K televisions, monitors and projectors would be measured against.

Used by Rec. 709 as its white point, Illuminant D65 is a commonly used standard defined by the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) to represent average daylight with a correlating colour temperature of approximately 6500K.

Each of these specifications and technical details are important and only projector models with high colour gamut coverage can reproduce colours accurately for viewers to deeply feel the rich vividness of Hollywood movies and the emotions directors convey through colours. In addition to films, even still images with intense colours will be able to reflect BenQ projector’s ability to perfectly present the most beautiful and realistic colours. 

 You’ll see red when they want you to see red and have a cool blue satisfied feeling.