Well let's talk about gamma correction - originally created because B/W Tv tubes were not linear, rather than doing the linear->tube conversion in each TV (which typically had ~10 tubes in them - think 10 transistors) they did the conversion in the Tv studio for ALL the TV receivers and just standardized the non-linearity of the TV screen tube's response.
We kept that same gamma when we switched to digital color spaces (and MPEG compression) - it's why noiry dark movies (think of Blade Runner with people in dark spaces smoking) - because of gamma correction there are few digital codes available at the dark corner of the digital color cubes and the result tends to be blocky simply because the color space simply can't represent those colors .... all because of a technical choice made in the late 30s to reduce the cost of Tvs
We kept that same gamma when we switched to digital color spaces (and MPEG compression) - it's why noiry dark movies (think of Blade Runner with people in dark spaces smoking) - because of gamma correction there are few digital codes available at the dark corner of the digital color cubes and the result tends to be blocky simply because the color space simply can't represent those colors .... all because of a technical choice made in the late 30s to reduce the cost of Tvs