Webcam Sense of Gray?

I have a webcam out there. It's a perfectly ordinary cheap webcam (Logitech Quickcam Express).

I recently discovered that while the webcam's screen resolution sort of sucks, the camera works amazingly well in dark and requires very little light actually work.

I was sitting by my computer one winter night, and refreshed the webcam:

Only gray, you say? No! Look closer! There was no light in the room, aside of the monitor light.

You may see something. I could see something.

Now, here's the same picture - with the colors messed a bit, and gray range changed...

Yeah, that's me. Naked. And gray. Complete with JPEG compression artifacts.

Isn't it interesting? The webcam works like human eye in this respect; In the dark, the webcam can't see colors! Do colors exist in the night?

But also remember that the upper picture is reality, the second picture is an interpretation. The color information can't end up to the picture, because there's not enough light to make difference between colors. The camera could tell fine difference between 4-5 shades of gray in this case... if there'd be more light, it would look better, of course.

What you are experiencing is not a lack of color, but lack of light.

(Whatever is written in the Web looks profound.)

(In diary)

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Last modified: Fri Apr 5 04:33:46 EEST 2002