6.1    Books

Effective Colour Displays – Theory and Practice
David Travis, Academic Press Ltd. ISBN 0-12-697690-2

This book is really about ‘human factors’ but has good chapters on computer display systems and easy to understand overviews of colour spaces and colour space conversions.

Handbook of Human Perception
K.Boff, L.Kaufman, & J.Thomas (Ed.), Wiley 1986

This book contains a chapter by A.B.Watson which gives a general description of the temporal response of the human visual system and indicates the problems with Bloch’s Law. Read this if you are interested in tachistoscopes. This chapter is also available on the internet at the NASA vision group site.

The Art of Electronics
Paul Horowitz & Winfield Hill, CUP, ISBN 0-521-37095-7

It is impossible to resist recommending this book which, although slightly long in the tooth, is probably the best book about real life electronics ever written. It contains more actually useful information about electronics than it would be possible to accumulate in a lifetime. Read it if you need to build any experimental equipment. (N.B. it is not too heavy on mathematics)

6.2    The internet

The really up-to-date material is now available on the internet and this often includes books or chapters of books that are made available by their authors. Because of its dynamic nature, a list of all the interesting sites would soon be obsolete but once you have made one connection, the web like nature of the system will soon link you into other relevant areas. Good places to start are the NASA vision group site http://vision.arc.nasa.gov/ and the visionscience site http://www.visionscience.com/

One highly recommended site is run by Charles Poynton who is a forthright video engineer. Amongst other things, he has informative pages on gamma and colour in television and computer systems as well as links to other sites mainly of an engineering rather than scientific nature. Access his home page at http://www.inforamp.net/~poynton/

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