You are comparing renders to "amature" photos that are not properly white balanced. They will never match. Renders are just approximations of what the product looks like for marketing purposes. The designers try to get it as close as possible but because of the inherent issue with matching real life materials with CG shaders and artificial lighting, we shouldn't fault the designers too much when they are a little bit off.
R1 of Space Cadet looks really really nice in person and I'm very excited to see R2 happening "soon".
First and foremost, by no means I intend to fault or blame any of the creators. It's just me trying to get better understanding of how much can one rely on renders. That may be a valuable lesson for me and others. Moreover, potential findings could be generalised for most of the projects here.
I have no doubts that R1 Space Cadet was a beautiful product, especially seeing it's high praise myself. It's just about objective benchmark and theoretical dispute.
Of course, what you pointed out is a legitimate concern - how far can you trust pictures taken in completely random lighting conditions, without any kind of referential setup, color correction, etc.
Still, don't you have an impression that having seen not one, but at least a few photos of any given object, your mind will be able to compensate enough to get at least rough idea?
That was my stand point. I take a fairly big margin, sure. But even then I can't imagine actual keycaps to follow blue accents presented on renders (which are also an approximation, point noted). The real colors are just of different tone, more zealous. On the other hand they do seem to resemble vintage SC pretty well. This is a bit of a conundrum, as it proves the reference can be made, but not necessarily with the renders.
What provoked my questions is the fact that current IC contains pictures with
even more muted blue shade. If anything one could expect the opposite, It just begs the question whether it is intentional this time, or how much of it falls into shaders/rendering shortcomings category.
Being a tiny bit familiar with whole color matching idea - but from DTP standpoint, where CMYK, inks, printers kick in - I assume that as long as we are in RGB territory (being an additive color model) designers have the tools to compensate a bit more precisely than what I pointed out.
