The Wii is black and white because of the way the screen works. You see, there are two types of screens for televisions, cathode ray tubes (CRT) and liquid crystal displays (LCD). CRTs work by bombarding a phosphor layer with electrons from an electron gun. A shadow mask behind the phosphor layer stops electrons from hitting it, allowing only certain colors to be displayed.

LCDs have no such masking system, so each pixel can be any color you want it to be. This makes them much more versatile than CRTs and also allows them to be much thinner than CRTs. However, LCDs also have some shortcomings when it comes to color reproduction — they aren’t as good at displaying reds and greens as they are blues and yellows.

This is because when red light hits the blue filter in front of an LCD screen’s liquid crystals, some of it is reflected away rather than absorbed by the crystals themselves (which absorb blue light better than other colors). The rest of the red light is absorbed by the green filter, but then reflected back out again due to how thin it is compared with the other filters on an LCD screen’s surface.

Last modified: August 3, 2022