Comment by fireattack

I misunderstood what you mean. Please ignore. On a side note, by colorspace I mainly meant that we can just stick with one with ultra-wide gamut. There are indeed other reasons to have different color spaces.

(Below is my original comment for transparency.)

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Gamma isn't really about CRT; or I should say, they're two different things. The fact CRT has a somewhat physical "gamma" (light intensity varies nonlinearly with the voltage) is likely just a coincidence with the gamma we're talking here.

The reason gamma is used in sRGB is because human eyes are more sensitive to changes in darker area, i.e. if the light intensity changes linearly, it feels more "jumpy" in darker end (which causes perceptible bandings). This is especially an issue with lower color depth. To solve this, we invented gamma space to give darker end more bits/intensity intervals to smooth the perceptive brightness.

>it's not needed to understand the difference between linear and non-linear colorspaces

It absolutely should, since any gamma space would have problem with "averaging", as explained by the GP. Actually, it's so bad that almost all the image editing/representing tasks we have today are doing it wrong (resizing, blurring, mixing..).

This topic has been discussed extensively on Internet, so I'm not going to go into detail too much. A good start point is [1][2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKnqECcg6Gw [2] http://blog.johnnovak.net/2016/09/21/what-every-coder-should...