We wish to supplement the well-written December 2016 LD+A article by our respected colleagues Drs. Michael Royer and Kevin Houser, entitled "Color Rendering: What Do We Want? Weighing 'High Fidelity' versus 'High Preference.'" There are five additional facts that readers need to consider to understand that the ideas of "high fidelity" and "high preference" are not in competition. Rather, they are as unrelated as are physical temperature (an objective idea) and emotional warmth (a subjective one). Color fidelity is a clearly defined, objective concept that has direct relevance to perception accuracy, whereas color preference is a rather unclear concept that, while interesting, lies on a different conceptual plane. The five facts are: 1. While typical interior illuminance values are "often less than 1 percent of natural outdoor daylight," natural outdoor daylight (under which color vision evolved) illuminance varies from much less than today's typical indoor illuminance levels, to much more. With variation from dawn/dusk to midday and different degrees of shade and cloud cover, people routinely observe colors quite accurately under outdoor illuminance levels ranging from about 10 to 100,000 lux. Human color vision has evolved to judge colors very well, under natural spectrum illumination, at typical indoor illuminance levels. This is one of the underlying reasons that day-lighting in buildings, at typical indoor illumination levels, is valued by many and often mandated.
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