Originally Posted by GUWonder

I was commenting about the earlier post's link having the (ordinary) passport cover's color appearing to be black (rather than blue), but that site having the color labeled as "blue" even as it appeared as black to my eyes.

US Diplomatic passport blanks' OFC and OBC color are not blue in color nowadays and generally haven't been for quite some. They are black OFC and OBC, as the latter post's link more correctly labels the color. But the link supplied for the non-Diplomatic book has the passport OFC appear more like black than blue to my eyes even as it's labeled the color as blue. [I've handled a whole variety of passports over the years.]

I would be surprised if the idea was to have US Diplomatic passport blanks issued with the same OFC and OBC color as the ordinary US passport blanks being used for passports being sought by most people in this thread -- no less so when the description details on the links have the right color labels for what has been traditional.

Black isn't blue to my eyes, but the links you supplied above seem to have black and blue as both looking the same to my eyes regardless of how they label the color. Does it look different to you in terms of the color of the outside covers?

Originally Posted by kale73

Somewhat off-topic, but...

While I haven’t handled a whole lot of passports in my life but I have worked a bit with color models in both print publications and web design. Perceived color is a ‘slippery’ thing. When I look at something with only my right eye, I ‘see’ a slightly different hue than when I look at the same thing (under the same lighting conditions) with only my left. The perceived color (or colour) of scanned or photographed images presented on screen depends on a host of variables including lighting, the equipment used to capture the image, the equipment used to portray the image, settings applicable to both, the background context of the image, and the viewer’s ‘perception’ - my loose term for the rather complex interaction between the eyes and the brain.

The standard issue U.S. passport isn’t just ‘blue’, it’s ‘navy blue’. More like an indigo that in certain lighting conditions will appear to be closer to black. If a standard and a diplomatic passport were scanned on the same device at the same time, I daresay you would be able to perceive the differences in the two when looking at them side-by-side. Viewing either one, in isolation, against a white background, may well make the dark blue seem to look like black. Also, viewing the same objects under sunlight or even artificial ‘white light’ rather than on a screen would almost certainly reveal their color differences.

If you want to know more, look up ‘gamut’ as it applies to color reproduction and perception.

My brand new passport is definitely Navy Blue.