The Walkman color wheel

Back with the color subject again, I thought it would be nice to see, after seeing almost every primary color (red, blue, green, yellow) and even white, all colors in the well-known color wheel.

Color and its perceiving is a very interesting subject, and it’s still misterious because science yet didn’t discover all about it.

What’s the color wheel? As you probably know, of all the thousands of different colors, there are six that are very important, and they are called the primaries. Three of them are found natively in light: red, green and blue (usually called light primaries) and the other three are produced by mixing 50% two light primaries: yellow, magenta (usually called pink) and cyan (usually called turquoise or even blue, but last one is wrong). Many scientist tried to map all the colors that the human vision system sees through the last century’s, but only one did it, and it was Albert H. Munsell who finally achieved it in 1918 with the Munsell color system.

This is not the Munsell atlas, but it also explains (maybe clearly to profanes) the “spatial position” and the relationship between colors is like this:

As you can see, red, green and blue are placed at about 60º of each other, and the other three are placed betweem them. White is obtained when mixing all colours at the time.

This Munsell color system describes the real relationship between primary colors, as well as with the luminance and saturacion, and has served as the starting point to develop further color studies that allowed the later born of the colorimetry, the color measurement science.

Yet for many people, color is a simple thing, specially for men, as we perceive the colors a bit differently from women 😉

So… now seriously. The color wheel is a wheel where all six primary colors are placed -more or less- equidistantly, like this:

So, could we make the Walkman color wheel? Well, I tried to, and that was the result:

where you can see a stunning red Sanyo JJ-P5 upside, the big yellow SONY WM-F5, the rare green AIWA G09, the cyan Kenwood CP-Q5, the deep blue SONY WM-DD33, and ultra-rare pink SONY WM-20 and the white SONY-702 at center of the image.

And here are the six + 1 colors:

SANYO Walkman JJ-P5 Red

This was one of the most advanced walkmans from this brand and in this color, also one of the rarest. It’s also known for being the world’s smallest walkman ever, according to John Lydle research that could be read in this post of Stereo2go

SONY Walkman WM-F5

The very first Sports walkman is also the very first yellow walkman in history. And it’s also one of the coolest Sports…

AIWA Walkman HS-G09 Green

The G09 is a very rare model from the golden years of AIWA (85-86), and this turquoise color is one of the rarest of all.

Kenwood CP-Q5 blue

This Kenwood was almost impossible to find outside Asian markets, and it has a quite weird design.

SONY WM-DD33 in deep blue

One of the most rare DDs, and one of the most attractive too.

SONY Walkman WM-20 Pink

Of all the WM-10/20/30 this one is one of the most rare due to it’s color. Designed for women?

SONY WM-702 White

The 701C was a milestone in walkman history. There was a white version, extremely rare to find that I don’t have, but the lower spec’d 702 doesn’t have the amorphous head nor Dolby C, but at first sight is seems the 701C, isn’t it?

Hope you enjoy!

Do any of you can photograph your own color wheel? Add yours in the forums.