"James Sweet" wrote
It won't look totally black, colored cards or filters are not nearly narrow enough for that, but the color rendering will not be
perfect if the emission bands don't exactly match the sensors in the eye.

I disagree a bit, but this is indeed a very complex field. As you say,
there are also the response curves of the eye's sensors to consider, but
in this case, IF you could find a narrowband-ISH (say) green filter that
looked green in sunlight, but whose green peak didn't match the (e.g. 532nm)
wavelength of the green laser, it'd look damn near black.

Actually I first thought about this a long time ago, and it's something
I'd love to try!

Mostly unrelated, but I believe that the eye's "red" sensor doesn't actually
peak in what we call "red". It's more orange, IIRC. It's just that the other
2 sensors drop off so much "earlier" (as lambda increases), that at the red end
of visible, that's the only one with ANY response, so we do get a different
unique overall perceived colour (i.e. what we think of as "deep red").

Also, there's the thing about the eye's "red" sensor also having response in
far-blue/violet, which leads to the confusing things that happen when we look
at sources in that part of the spectum, as well as the confusion that arises
between violet/purple.

It's interesting stuff!


Martin
--
M.A.Poyser Tel.: 07967 110890
Manchester, U.K. http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=fleetie