Why do pixels use RGB colors and not the primary colors RBY?
Xenopixel RGB Color Codes
What is razer's green color code (in hex or rgb)
R:71 G:225 B:12
More on reddit.compygame.Color(name) -- the list of 657 names you can use
This is easily acessible via the constant color.THECOLORS
>>> from pprint import pprint >>> import pygame as pg >>> >>> pprint(pg.color.THECOLORS)
In general I do believe you will find these follow the allowable html color conventions:
https://htmlcolorcodes.com/color-names/
This thread is not to ask the same question that has been asked before, but to clarify some things that I felt were misleading with previous answers.
I was thinking about why our screens use red/green/blue to display colors, instead of the (classic)primary colors red/blue/yellow(or their complementaries). I found some old threads full of (what appears to be) people explaining scientific concepts without addressing the WHY of the question, or saying silly things like "your teachers lied", as if the objective concept of primary colors is wrong and the science of perceiving color is above the science of the light frequency spectrum.
The problem with RGB vs (classic RBY)primary colors is that the primary colors are spaced out equally according to frequency whereas in RGB green is closer to blue than red.
I saw a lot of answers bringing up the difference between additive and subtractive colors, but not really much explanation behind why we'd use RGB(Green) in particular.
The one explanation that made sense to me was that the human eye perceives green easier than yellow(because it uses RGB rods), thus we use a slightly distorted version of primary colors to easily display all colors. However is this not also one of the reasons we use the slightly offset subtractive color scheme of cyan/yellow/magenta? The frequent answer "because RGB is additive and screens emit light" is a bit lacking of explanation.
Also, nobody seemed to mention that the "green" in rgb is not pure green, but closer to yellow.
Is my analysis correct? Am I missing something?
Edit: Thanks to everyone. Lots of good answers and I have a much better understanding now.
DaveBoltman's answer is very remarkable and useful. However, the phosphors' wavelengths in Wikipedia are not exact. There are other references and Google books giving slightly different values. For instance, P1 w/l is 525, not 528 nm: http://www.labguysworld.com/crt_phosphor_research.pdf
Anyway, I remember what colors those phosphors displayed (including the amber phosphors), so I am nearly sure of these RGB and Hex values:
I suppose that Apple //c and Apple /// monitors used the P24 GE phosphor, because they had its hue. And the background of the old monochrome CRTs usually was lighter than pure black, see this photo:
For better eye comfort, I suggest that the OP use any of those greens with that background. In the dark, the old-fashioned green on dark gray looks better than the present black on white.
Inspired by the below (incomplete) answers:
Almost all the "'old fashioned' green screen computer displays/VDUs" used the P1 phosphor (see wikipedia reference)
The P1 phosphor produces a peak wavelength (a.k.a. colour in human terms) of 528 nm (reference)
Converting colour from a wavelength to RGB values (in the commonly used byte format of 0 to 255) using formulae here, gives: Red=65 Green=255 Blue=0, or #41FF00 in hexadecimal. (see this convertor).
This does not take brightness into account. (to adjust the brightness the RBG value would need to be converted to HSV, have the V component adjusted up or down, then converted back to RGB to satisfy the OP).