Really wish talking about what shrimp see didn't remind me that in farming them females have one eye removed to promote breeding

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyestalk_ablation

Technically, all the colors are fake. They're just the halucinations of a brain trying to understand the input from sensory organs.

I don't think of it as drama so much as docucomedy.

Imagine how OP their colour perception would be if they did have that mental processing power

But compared with human eyesight, they could still see more 'colors' - As we see (almost) the same white in incandescent bulbs as LEDs and fluorescents, they might actually see the component colors and their intensities.

Not unlike how we may hear a combination tone when multiple other tones are played, and hear the difference (or sum) of them.

I need to use wherewithal more in my daily life

How did they test if they could see color? Did they make little shrimp dioramas or something?

My whole world is crumbling

The shrimp are holier than we are because they cannot see the devil's color (it's pink 🩷)

The way mantis shrimp see is nonetheless super cool and interesting. They likely have no conception of 2D color at all, and can only sense the 12 different colors in general. Furthermore, only the midband of their eyes see color, when the eyes are moving and scanning for prey, they don't see color at all, which probably helps offload mental load for their small brains. Once they do see something, they then stop moving their eyes to determine the color of what they're looking at.

Also, mantis shrimp have 6 more photoreceptors in addition to the 12 colored ones, to detect polarized light. They likely see them the same way that they see color, so they probably don't consider them anything different than wavelength which is what we interpret as color.

Ed Yong's An Immense World has a section on this and I'd highly recommend it. The ways animals sense and perceive the world are often so different for ours and it's so fascinating.

Reminds me a little of CD digital audio. The original Red Book audio standard hasn't really been improved upon because it's uncompressed audio which covers basically all of the range of human hearing within the capabilities of any speaker we could build. It's uncompressed because in the early 80's when the tech hit the market, it was completely unfeasible to include the CPU and RAM needed to decompress audio in real time.

Shrimp has more color receptors because he doesn't have enough neurons to run trichromacy, so he sees in EGA.