this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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I was gifted a pair of enchromas, and while they don't make me see "new" colors, it's undeniable to me that they allow me to distinguish between some colors that I previously could not.
For example, light pinks always flatten out to grey for me. Wearing the glasses lets me distinguish between grey and pink. Likewise, I can see the fall colors in trees and can point out which ones are red/orange/green/yellow whereas I could not before.
So yes, they are deceptively marketed and probably not worth the money. But they do, in fact, have some utility.
This is accurate. Most likely you have a mild form of CVD, where some of the cones in your eyes overlap in their light frequency response. This makes it hard to distinguish colours containing that frequency range, because multiple cones respond to them when only one should.
The glasses actually work by completely blocking out the light in those overlapping frequency ranges. This will help to avoid the confusion between the cones, and could help you better distinguish colours containing components in those ranges. That's also why the glasses have this pink hue in the video. By removing some colours from white light, the remaining ones combine into pink-ish light.
Obviously, you cannot restore normal colour vision by blocking out even more colours. The marketing from enchroma is pretty scummy.
It sucks that their marketing is shitty, because what they actually do seems pretty clever. I have a pair of enchromas and I enjoy them for what they are - being able to distinguish color differences when I can't normally is fun.
It's an overpriced novel experience, probably not worth it but cool if you can afford it.
Shitty, but also really clever in terms of marketing. "Helping people with colour blindness more easily distinguish between certain colours whose wavelengths overlap (but are distinct to those without colour blindness)" is accurate, but not as exciting (or as easily understandable) as "FIXES COLOUR BLINDNESS".
Fair, I honestly don't know how else you explain that to most people concisely.
Sorry I wrote rods once when i clearly meant cones. You are correct that rods do not detect color of course, thank you for noticing the error.
Here is a pretty nice article on CVD that explores a lot of the genetics. It even mentions the enchroma (not by name of course) in the management section:
This might be an older article as i believe some research on notch filters has since been done. As far as I know, there is some limited evidence that they improve performance specifically in colour discrimination tasks. There's usually no evidence that they improve overall colour perception.
Not all cases of CVD are of this kind either (although it's the most common cause), if you have monochromacy, dichromacy, or generally anything other than anomalous trichromacy, these glasses will do nothing. There are even rare cases where the eye can see colour perfectly fine and the problem is in the brain, although this is usually classified as some sort of aphasia and is not strictly speaking colour blindness.
So I'm curious, what do things look like with the glasses on that you're able to distinguish these colors? Can you describe what you're seeing when you see gray vs. pink with and without the glasses, for example? Sorry if it's not really possible to do so. It's just very interesting to me!
So, for my normal color vision it's as though the saturation for red and green is reduced by about 75%. I can distinguish between very bright samples of red and green, but the more mellow tones just kind of wash out. Likewise for colors that contain red/green: for example, purple will wash out to blue unless its very bright.
With the glasses on, it's as though someone put a mild pink/purple filter on and pumped up the saturation to be only -10% or so; its a lot easier to tell what color I'm looking at. Oranges in particular are extremely vivid.
I had them on when I was bringing groceries out to the car one time and I had a pot roast that I was loading into the trunk. I didn't have the sunglasses on in the store, but I put them on while leaving. Normally meat looks brown to me, and it was genuinely shocking to see the bright red blood; I briefly wondered what was wrong with it before I remembered I was wearing the glasses.
Very interesting, thanks! I wonder how it makes things appear more saturated if it's just mildly tinting everything pink.
Supposedly it blocks out the in-between colors that muddy up perception.
If we use sound as an analogy, it would be like putting a high-pass filter on a busy signal so that you can better perceive the high end without the other sound waves changing the fundamental.
Yeah but you lose a lot of colour perception too. Plus anything with a narrowband colour (like an LED) outside of the narrow filter is practically totally filtered out
I suppose that microwave sensation to the brain might have been Enchroma bending my thoughts and experiences to their will.
I'd not considered it until I read your accusation. Thank you for bringing the possibility to my attention; I'll listen for another sizzling sound in my ears.