<snip original message>
>
> Second, it is not theoretically possible to "accurately reproduce
> color." Perfectly accurate "color" has a continuous spectrum that would
> require a near infinite number of channels to reproduce. All scanning,
> printing and color display depend on the human perceptual trick that aliases
> many colors together. It is a miraculous stroke of technical luck that most
> color perceptions can be aliased to colors produced from small sets of
> primaries.
>
> Imagine if hearing could be similarly tricked using only three pitches:-)
It is possible to do a spectrographic scanner.
As a first cut, take an ordinary scanner, replace the fluorescant tube
with some sort of light that emits over a wider spectrum.
Now, replace the linear imaging array with a square one, and stick a
diffraction grating in the optical path.
The compression of this is sort of the same problem as mpeg, with
the spectrum as the third dimension rather than time.
Whereas a 24bit 1200dpi scanner might produce files of up to half a gig,
a spectral scanner might do half a terabyte. (uncompressed, compressed
it'd be a lot smaller)
A poor-mans version of this could be done with a standard scanner (one of the
older three-pass sort), and simply put in more lamps or filters.
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