Psychophysical verification of the accuracy of color and color-difference simulations of surface samples on a CRT display

We describe an experiment to visually quantify the accuracy of the simulation of the color and color-difference of surface samples on a CRT display unit. A gray-scale-anchored, magnitude-estimation experiment was performed to assess the absolute quality of the simulations and a forced-choice, paired-comparisons experiment was performed to assess the relative quality of the simulations. Results indicate that an average color difference for overall simulation accuracy can be under 3.0 CIELAB color-difference units for highcolor-temperature sources, and slightly worse for low-colortemperature sources. All simulations were well under the 6 to 12 unit differences reported for typical color reproduction. Possible reasons for the residual color differences between the current simulations and the theoretical limit are presented.