EnChroma – Color for the Colorblind, Personally Tested Review

[Mark Phelan]

For those who are unaware, there is a company called EnChroma that has created glasses and sunglasses for those of us who are colorblind. I first read about them in this thread: http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?128765-Fix-colour-blindness&highlight=enchroma

This past Monday I was at a family funeral with my nephew. He and I both are colorblind, his more severe, mine is milder. He was excited for me to try his new sunglasses he'd just received as a birthday gift, a pair of Cx-14 standard EnChroma sunglasses. He suggested I go outside for a test, so I did. Putting them on was like HDRx, all of a sudden I could see shades, i.e. varying levels of color that I could not see before. It was wild. There was a completely new level of colors I'd never seen.

I came back in describing it to my nephew and he said, "YES, that's exactly what I told my wife!" His wife tried them on saying, "they're just sunglasses" completely unimpressed. Well duh, she's not colorblind, so it did nothing for her.

I'm seriously considering getting a pair. Actually, what I really want is for Oakley to license the technology to incorporate it into my current frames. The company does do custom lenses, so that might be another option.

If you're colorblind, you got to see if you can try these glasses. They have a nifty test on their website that will help to determine if the glasses will be beneficial to you. I am a Moderate Protan, red-green deficiency, so they do help me. Someone who is a Strong Protan it might not help as much, according to their site. You'll need to try for yourself by doing the test found here.http://enchroma.com/test/instructions/ I will say it is similar to the standard Ishihara Color Plates test, but not the same, being designed specifically towards the EnChroma glasses.

Here's the link to the EnChroma website.

If anyone else here who is colorblind has tried them, would like to hear your reaction.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Good on you Mark. What's the science behind it?

 

[Mark Phelan]

Good on you Mark. What's the science behind it?

Wayne, read about it here: http://enchroma.com/technology/

I want to point out that this is not a cure, EnChroma even says so on their website. I would describe it as seeing a much wider spectrum of color. I can see red and green and have no problem confusing one for the other. It's the colors they are in that cause confusion, blue vs purple is one I confuse all the time. Green vs brown is another issue for me. These glasses help separate and make the colors distinguishable.

I've always told folks that the better the light source, the better I can see colors. When I tried on the glasses, they helped even more and it was a real treat to look at leaves, the sky, flowers with a greater appreciation. That's about all I can describe it as. But read the page, it'll explain what they're doing far better than I could.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

It works exactly as I thought, it uses filters to cut out spectral bands of overlap in the response of the cones. I had to read through a lot of blurb to get there. Another happy accident story, where if any reasonable capable person actually sat and thought about it with all the info they could come up with the solution, which is what I did. I had thought missing color receptor was an issue too, but they did not mention it.

You will find that it will give great improvements, but not perfect, as certain colors will have great portions in the filtered bands. But a good improvement, I would not mind KBE just to chill out and enjoy greater color situation on projected screens.

A better avenue might be to explore why the color receptors overlap, and see if it can be treated nutritionally do that over time you get better seperation. Another idea is it would be good if we had screens where we could move narrow band red green and blue wavelengths around to get the same effect, but with correct color balanced image. All TV manufacturers could include it as standard as a legislated accessability feature (which can be exclusively used before legislation). It might be that the TV canbe accepibly set up for all members of the family. I've had a technology proposal that could archurvr this for years. Just some thoughts.

 

[Mark Phelan]

It works exactly as I thought, it uses filters to cut out spectral bands of overlap in the response of the cones. I had to read through a lot of blurb to get there. Another happy accident story, where if any reasonable capable person actually sat and thought about it with all the info they could come up with the solution, which is what I did. I had thought missing color receptor was an issue too, but they did not mention it.

You will find that it will give great improvements, but not perfect, as certain colors will have great portions in the filtered bands. But a good improvement, I would not mind KBE just to chill out and enjoy greater color situation on projected screens.

A better avenue might be to explore why the color receptors overlap, and see if it can be treated nutritionally do that over time you get better seperation. Another idea is it would be good if we had screens where we could move narrow band red green and blue wavelengths around to get the same effect, but with correct color balanced image. All TV manufacturers could include it as standard as a legislated accessability feature (which can be exclusively used before legislation). It might be that the TV canbe accepibly set up for all members of the family. I've had a technology proposal that could archurvr this for years. Just some thoughts.

All good thoughts. I too had thought of alternative ways to achieve a similar result, Retinax V perhaps? I would be dubious about nutrition being a fix, but could certainly see where adjusting a TV, but then everyone else would scream "fix the color!". One thing I do know, those who are color-sighted scream the most when colors seem out of whack. That's where we have a leg up on you guys, we don't care because we are colorblind. Ebony and Ivory, live together in perfect harmony...

It would be fun to take a colorblind test with the glasses on to see what changes, especially the Farnsworth-Munsell 100 Hue test.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Your wife didn't notice the difference, which leads me to believe (along with other things) that a happy medium in spectral shift can be achieved on a display for you, where the relative luminance of the shifted color canbe boosted to appear "normal to most everyone. It also means you could get a monitor it viewfinder and set it to give you great color and the color the glasses would block.

Maybe red would like to do it. There is color shift across the population, such a solution could allow anybody in the production chain (that are not too bad) to see an approximation of what the majority of the audience see. Very valuable. Our shades of difference produce problems.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

I'll post separately about nutrition.

Sometimes genetics leads to a lack of delivered nutrition to certain areas in the body, leading to dysfunction. There are massive interconnecting systems of cycle in the body, so a single gene can lead to failure. If the lack of differential between the cones is due to non delivery of a nutrient/s to the cone/s and it is safe to deliver this nutrient spread by other means, then yes it might be treatable.

Nutrients have a range of effects on vision, which I mentioned before, and I've noticed color balance shifts myself after certain nutrients (write about it before, but forget which) which I don't know if it was at the five level is the brains color balance. I've actually just be found deficient in a number of things, particularly Molybdenum, which has caused major issues, including vision issues at times. Once I got the Molybdenum balance right you could not believe the sudden dramatic increase in fibe detail and contrasr and color (along with the other things I'm takng that affect vision aswell that had already improved their sections of vision. The molybdenum just released everything.).

It is well worth making an list of what dies what. Maybe obecday a vase line multivitamin can be made for people that di visual work, like film production, to give their vision a little kick in the right direction (please note I'm not advocating a diet free high dose strategy, they can be hazardous or have negative effects long term, particularly with the negative feed back issues in the bodies physiology. But just enough to get you to the base level cycles in and off to avoid negative feed back, then diet does the rest long term).

 

[Mark Phelan]

I'll post separately about nutrition.

Sometimes genetics leads to a lack of delivered nutrition to certain areas in the body, leading to dysfunction. There are massive interconnecting systems of cycle in the body, so a single gene can lead to failure. If the lack of differential between the cones is due to non delivery of a nutrient/s to the cone/s and it is safe to deliver this nutrient spread by other means, then yes it might be treatable.

Nutrients have a range of effects on vision, which I mentioned before, and I've noticed color balance shifts myself after certain nutrients (write about it before, but forget which) which I don't know if it was at the five level is the brains color balance. I've actually just be found deficient in a number of things, particularly Molybdenum, which has caused major issues, including vision issues at times. Once I got the Molybdenum balance right you could not believe the sudden dramatic increase in fibe detail and contrasr and color (along with the other things I'm takng that affect vision aswell that had already improved their sections of vision. The molybdenum just released everything.).

It is well worth making an list of what dies what. Maybe obecday a vase line multivitamin can be made for people that di visual work, like film production, to give their vision a little kick in the right direction (please note I'm not advocating a diet free high dose strategy, they can be hazardous or have negative effects long term, particularly with the negative feed back issues in the bodies physiology. But just enough to get you to the base level cycles in and off to avoid negative feed back, then diet does the rest long term).

Makes sense. I was considering if the eye's development was damaged from the get-go, then no amount of nutrients would correct. But you make some valid points and I agree that vision can definitely be affected by chemical balance or lack thereof. And to your point about giving a little kick in the right direction, that is what these sunglasses did for me. It is not a panacea, but I would compare it to wearing polarized lenses for the first time. There were colors and an intensity that were not visible before. And I did compare them to my polarized Oakley's to see the difference. Definitely pronounced and fun.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Yeah, it can be damaged straight up irrevocably in development, but it might be possible that
It is changed straight up because of wrong nutrition profile, and in that case it might make the difference, something researchers should definitely investigate. I'm thinking of starting up a web site advocating and reporting on genetic research to correct Autism. Ultimately I'm interested if it is possible to permanently change the gene pool through epigemetics.

 

[Mark Phelan]

Melange comes to mind.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

What's Melange Mark?

 

[Mark Phelan]

The spice Melange was the commodity fought over in the Dune series of novels written by Frank Herbert.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melange_(fictional_drug)

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

I don't expect that you would use this on a computer monitor. I mean the easiest way to test is to put the glasses on and look at one. You would probably need to change the filter array on the LCDs since TVs don't actually create any colors except for Red, Green and Blue. There's a difference between Red + Plus Green = Yellow and "Yellow" aka 600nm light. Color only works on a computer monitor because it's tricking our color sensitive cells into experiencing something that normally is associated with yellow. So if you had a filter for instance that did a cut on 600nm yellow light it wouldn't do anything, the display would be just as yellow since there is no "yellow" light, only green and red. You could definitely though apply a colorspace transform and tweak the primary saturation points of the filter array in a custom manufactured TV for blind people. That would work. But I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work to just ship a filter to put over top of your TV. All that would do is just modulate the brightness of the Red, Green and Blue lights. You can do that much more easily through a 3D LUT.