[retsibsi]

Just out of curiosity, what if you go to a significantly darker brown, say 30/100/20 h/s/v. Unfortunately these subjective tests will vary from monitor to monitor, but assuming that's still clearly brown rather than black to you (to me it's a more archetypal brown than the brighter version you initially named, which I might call orange-brown) -- what do you perceive when you keep the saturation and value fixed, and vary the hue? Would you agree that many or most of the other hues give you a colour more obviously 'dark X', where X is the 100%-value counterpart, than hue 30 does? For me it's much more obvious at the green-blue-purple segment of the spectrum than the red-orange-yellow segment.

This isn't meant as a trick question or anything -- if I'm getting at anything specific, it's that maybe part of the reason the orange-brown link seems more obvious to you than to me is that when you think of a central example of brown, you think of something brighter (and thus more obviously orange) than I do.

[chrisseaton]

> Would you agree that many or most of the other hues give you a colour more obviously 'dark X'

Hmm not really. But we're not going to resolve what seems like a subjective question!

[retsibsi]

Oh don't worry, I wasn't planning on trying to argue the point! Just genuinely curious about the extent to which our difference is perceptual/conceptual/other. If we disagree on the 'dark X' thing, it makes me think there's a real perceptual difference and/or a pretty deep conceptual one (in terms of how we divide up the colour spectrum), though of course it doesn't prove anything.