What your cat sees
A photo, or your camera, shown in the colors and detail a cat sees. Nothing leaves this device.
Choose a photo or use the camera to see it both ways.
Worked out in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to us.
Colors, side by side
Each color as you see it, above, and as a cat's two kinds of cone see it, below.
- Red
- Orange
- Yellow
- Green
- Blue
- Purple
- Pink
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How we show it
Cats have two main kinds of color-sensing cone, most sensitive at about 440 and 555 nanometers, and have difficulty telling red, green and yellow apart (Ofri, 2018). We show it with the standard simulation of that kind of color vision (Viénot, Brettel and Mollon, 1999), the same one we use for dogs.
Cats see detail less sharply than dogs: about 20/150, where 20/20 is normal for a person (Ofri, 2018). We blur the picture by that much, taking a photo to span about 65 degrees, the view of a phone camera.
What a photo cannot show
Cats can see in light about six times dimmer than people need, and take in a view about 200 degrees wide (Ofri, 2018). A photo cannot show either, so we do not try.
Sources
- Ofri, "Vision in Dogs and Cats", dvm360, 2018
- Viénot, Brettel and Mollon, "Digital video colourmaps for checking the legibility of displays by dichromats", Color Research and Application, 1999
Questions
Can cats see color?
Some. They have two main kinds of color cone, so blues stand out, while reds, greens and yellows are hard for them to tell apart.
Why is the picture blurrier than for dogs?
Cats see detail about half as sharply as dogs do: about 20/150, against 20/75 for dogs.
Is my photo uploaded?
No. The picture is changed in your browser, and a camera picture never leaves your device.