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Life & fun · June 27, 2020

RA

Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor

Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor launched on June 27, 2020 with 389 votes, #25 of 4,317 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 6 years on.

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In plain words

Rainbow is a software tool that attempts to display color on black-and-white monitors. Launched in 2020, it addresses the technical challenge of rendering colors on displays that lack color capability. The software is designed for users who work with older monochrome monitors or operate in environments where color displays are unavailable. It offers a creative solution for representing color information on B&W screens through alternative visualization methods.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

The aim of this project was to display a colour image on a black and white monitor, by overlaying an acetate bayer filter (inkjet printed) over the monitor and mosaicing a colour image. I obtained an Eizo B&W monitor from ebay, which I was intending for use viewing B&W photos and was curious if I could replicate an effect similar to Autochrome Lumière ( see wikipedia ) where they overlay colour filters over a B&W photographic plate, using starch grains, which creates a colour image. The following image shows a 500x microscope image of the pixels that make up the B&W LCD display, taken using a cheap USB microscope. It looks to me as if each pixel, is represented by 4 sub-pixel elements,…from anfractuosity.com

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