AbstractWe describe an experiment to visually quantify the accuracy of the simulation of the color and color‐difference of surface samples on a CRT display unit. A gray‐scale‐anchored, magnitude‐estimation experiment was performed to assess the absolute quality of the simulations and a forced‐choice, paired‐comparisons experiment was performed to assess the relative quality of the simulations. Results indicate that an average color difference for overall simulation accuracy can be under 3.0 CIELAB color‐difference units for highcolor‐temperature sources, and slightly worse for low‐colortemperature sources. All simulations were well under the 6 to 12 unit differences reported for typical color reproduction. Possible reasons for the residual color differences between the current simulations and the theoretical li