I felt the first one looked more even. On the first I could tell the difference between every two adjacent bars. On the second one I couldn't tell any difference between the first 4-5 bars.
The gradient examples between high-chroma colors of similar luminance are highly misleading in my opinion. In that particular case, linear just happens to do well (and device RGB of course poorly), but in other cases linear is not great. For example, blue to white is especially bad, with hue shifts as well as lightness non-uniformity.
You can experiment with this in the interactive tester in my Oklab review[1].
[1]: https://raphlinus.github.io/color/2021/01/18/oklab-critique....
LoganDark•1h ago
Technically, this is not always incorrect, if your working color space is linear and 0 is no light. The problem only comes if you hand that same data to routines or surfaces expecting sRGB or another nonlinear color space (or one where 0 is not no light).
nomel•1h ago
Oh, interesting. What's an example of this? Some sort of log space?
LoganDark•1h ago
pavlov•1h ago
The most common 8-bit YUV format (e.g. in MPEG-2) uses a 16-235 range for valid luma values, so black is at 16 and white is at 235.
The reason for leaving this “headroom” and “footroom” had to do both with digitizing analog signals and avoiding clipping during processing.
Someone•59m ago
The bevel of a black iPhone is darker than its screen, even when powered off. Similarly, switched off CRT displays aren’t truly black.