Will there ever be a brown laser ?

[Elopement]

Nobody think about these things, but what if ?..

 

[Ears and Eggs]

It has happened. There was a member here who dropped his Sanwu Striker in the toilet.

 

[Elopement]

Originally lasers were deemed to have no practical value. How Ironic it would be to not have the investment into the brown area of the light spectrum based on the same presumptions.

 

[julianthedragon]

the brown area of the light spectrum

do you mean orange? or maybe the properties of light are different under bridges

 

[Anthony P]

Brown is a combination of primary colors. Maybe with a RGBY.

 

[Dusty_Lenses]

Brown is a combination of primary colors. Maybe with a RGBY.

The ShoWWx RGB laser pico projectors make brown. Im not sure what levels and wavelength make this color though.

 

[Elopement]

But no brown diode ?

 

[bostjan]

But no brown diode ?

I have a bin full of brown diodes. I'd sell you one, but, since I'm such a nice guy, instead, I'll tell you how to make one. Take a blue diode, and drive it with too much current. The blue colouration will come out of the diode in the form of smoke. Voila! What's left is a diode that is brown and smells bad.

 

[sightfx]

Brown is not a hue of light. It is orange in the context of being dimmer than it's surroundings so you can't make it by adding more light. You're best bet is to start with a black laser made of aniti-photons and add orange using a crystal ball until you see there will never be brown light. Only brighter lights around dim orange.

 

[bostjan]

Brown is not a hue of light. It is orange in the context of being dimmer than it's surroundings so you can't make it by adding more light. You're best bet is to start with a black laser made of aniti-photons and add orange using a crystal ball until you see there will never be brown light. Only brighter lights around dim orange.

I somewhat disagree with the last part of that. I know wikipedia says brown is just dark orange, but no. Dark orange is dark orange. Brown is dark tan. Tan is a desaturated colour. If you take RBG and you mix in mostly red light, a fair amount of green (but markedly less than red) and a twinge of blue, you get brown or tan. It's like magenta, in that, the perception of it is dependent upon stimulating multiple cones in the eye, so there is no equivalent wavelength of monochromatic light. You could make an RGB diode laser and tune it in to have a tan colouration, if you wanted. But, seeing as how the power of commonly available diodes is ordered blue > green > red, you'd be pumping the majority of the power into what would likely be the least powerful of the three diodes to make tan.

All that said, I thought the tone of this thread was jokey. "Will there ever be a brown laser?" when we already have cheap commercially-available RGB handhelds is either a joke or, if it's serious, it makes at least one wildly misguided presupposition.

 

[julianthedragon]

I just sensed trolling at first but I like that we could turn this thread educational somehow

 

[sightfx]

I somewhat disagree with the last part of that. I know wikipedia says brown is just dark orange, but no. Dark orange is dark orange. Brown is dark tan. Tan is a desaturated colour. If you take RBG and you mix in mostly red light, a fair amount of green (but markedly less than red) and a twinge of blue, you get brown or tan. It's like magenta, in that, the perception of it is dependent upon stimulating multiple cones in the eye, so there is no equivalent wavelength of monochromatic light. You could make an RGB diode laser and tune it in to have a tan colouration, if you wanted. But, seeing as how the power of commonly available diodes is ordered blue > green > red, you'd be pumping the majority of the power into what would likely be the least powerful of the three diodes to make tan.

All that said, I thought the tone of this thread was jokey. "Will there ever be a brown laser?" when we already have cheap commercially-available RGB handhelds is either a joke or, if it's serious, it makes at least one wildly misguided presupposition.

I understand the thinking but how I understand it saturation doesn't matter. both Brown and Magenta rely on special context (made only in the brain) but that is where the similarity ends. Here is a video that explains it in detail

 

[bostjan]

I understand the thinking but how I understand it saturation doesn't matter. both Brown and Magenta rely on special context (made only in the brain) but that is where the similarity ends. Here is a video that explains it in detail

The paradigm shift for me was about halfway through the video, when he said that colours are defined as distinct colours when we make up a word for them. That's 100% true and that's fully the point, I suppose.

But let's come back to your original statement:

Brown is not a hue of light.

I think there are different definitions of "hue." If you think of a hue as a specific wavelength of light, then I agree. But I don't think that's the general-purpose meaning of the word "hue." If I look up the meaning of "hue" in Merriam-Webster's dictionary, it says that "hue" is synonymous with colour, or else is a colour attributed to another base colour. I think that, in either of those cases, brown is a hue. Brown is a colour, and I could describe something as brownish-red or brownish-green. So, in colloquial use, brown is a hue of light.

What about in the lexicon of a physicist? I cannot find a good definition of the term, but I think this is how you are using it, and I have a tendency to think of a hue as anything that could be used as a primary colour, which brown cannot.

It is orange in the context of being dimmer than it's surroundings so you can't make it by adding more light

I see that's what the guy in the video is saying, and it's what wikipedia is saying, and I don't think it's entirely accurate, but maybe not entirely inaccurate. Brown, as a pigment, is something that reflects more longwave light and less shortwave light. Brown on a computer monitor is more accurately described as 165,42,42. It's not dark orange in either case, but more like reddish or orangish grey. But dark orange, I guess, to some people, looks brown. It's back to what he said in the video about defining a word and pegging that to a colour. It's cultural. Some references might be more universal than others. When he said that the colour orange, in English, was named after the fruit, it means that someone pegged the colour to the object at some point in time. Red is based off of the proto-indo-european word for blood, so, long long ago, that colour term was pegged to a substance that we all know. For example, in Russian, blue water would be "golubaya voda," but "goluboi" is more associated with the translation of cyan.

Coming back to brown, there isn't really a "thing" that has a steady colour that would be the reference point. A brown bear? A brown recluse? A brown anole? A brown bat? A brown hyena? A brown orchid? Brown-skin potato? They're all different colours, really. Also, I've grown skeptical of this method, since it's now an internet meme about how blueberries aren't really blue.

So, I think that, if we want to define "brown light" as something, we can agree that it's not any monochromatic wavelength. But I think it would have to be some wide band of visible wavelengths with some sort of attenuation as a function of frequency - so more intense long wavelengths and less intense short wavelengths, with middle wavelengths somewhere in the middle.

I think that's maybe a lot more complex that "dark orange," but I think that the "dark orange" qualifier isn't really quite accurate in the context of this conversation. But, on the other hand, if you could only choose two words to explain brown, for some reason, "dark orange" would probably be the best choice, even if it misses the boat when it comes to nuance.

You're best bet is to start with a black laser made of aniti-photons and add orange using a crystal ball until you see there will never be brown light.

Huh? I'm guessing satire, but photons are their own anti-particle. But you don't need to darken anything. The more lightwash is interfering with the light you intend to appear brown, the more brown it will appear. So just shining an orange laser on a brightly lit wall would be a place to start. But if brown is best described as a broad band of visible long-wave light, that's just the opposite of what a laser does. But I guess just take some medium that lases multiple wavelengths of visible light, with the strongest peaks in the red, some less-strong peaks in the yellow or green, and only very weak peaks in the blue, and you'd have your brown laser. Although I agree that, in a dark room, the result wouldn't appear to be "brown."

 

[kecked]

When I was doing laser shows I needed brown for desks and other wood objects. It is actually very tricky to make and translate to any other projector. It is so sensitive you need to tweak it nearly every time you run the show or and more likely it is so poorly defined in our brain that brown one day is orange the next. Same thing happens to me with white. Too red too blue…ahh perfect. Next day too red too blue….

 

[Eidetical]

I always considered brown to be dark yellow on the red side, not orange, but that may be just semantics. It's really difficult to get in holograms, as was mentioned about light shows. One good example was the 1980s work by Adrian Lines titled "Duck Board, Bored Duck", where he got the wood boards to look brown using pseudocolor effects by using a red laser and pre-swelling the emulsion with triethanolamine. Very difficult, but waaaaay cool to see in the finished image. Very difficult even for those using RGB lasers and panchromatic film these days. A holographer who focused on brown (or other naturally desaturated colors) could "push the envelope" in the holographic art world with such photorealism, as typical holographic imagery is still composed of "juke box colors".

 

[bostjan]

I always considered brown to be dark yellow on the red side, not orange, but that may be just semantics. It's really difficult to get in holograms, as was mentioned about light shows. One good example was the 1980s work by Adrian Lines titled "Duck Board, Bored Duck", where he got the wood boards to look brown using pseudocolor effects by using a red laser and pre-swelling the emulsion with triethanolamine. Very difficult, but waaaaay cool to see in the finished image. Very difficult even for those using RGB lasers and panchromatic film these days. A holographer who focused on brown (or other naturally desaturated colors) could "push the envelope" in the holographic art world with such photorealism, as typical holographic imagery is still composed of "juke box colors".

Where can I find info on that hologram?