Posted by R. John Howe on March 02, 1999 at 05:42:29:
Dear folks -
The inability to touch a piece of weaving is repeatedly mentioned as the chief draw back in buying a rug on the Internet. I'm also impressed with how difficult it is yet to determine accurately the colors in a rug there.
One of the earliest rules I remember hearing about estimating color when one is looking at a rug "in the wool," is that one should always take it to natural light. (Reason: the colors are very likely to be different there.)
I know of a number of experienced folks who have bought weavings on the Internet and who have found when the piece arrived that the colors were markedly different from what they had seen on the screen.
Yes, we can do wonderful things to adjust color. (Wendel Swan, before he put up his little Persian change purses, adjusted the colors on the screen carefully in a side by side comparison with the pieces but who knows how close the colors on my screen were to those adjustments when I viewed these images?) Even pixel level adjustments on one end may not produce the same shades at the other.
So I would add the accurate determination of color to the current obstacles that interfere with the project of buying a rug on the Internet.
Regards,
John Howe