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You are so right!
The basic science of color **reproduction** (get the basic meaning?) is color **matching**, that is how do you take a mixture of three primary colors and make it look exactly like the original color (match it or reproduce it), even though the spectra may be completely different. You have to be able to do this first, before making any of the appearance corrections mentioned below.
You are right, the way a color looks depends on the visual environment. This observation is the basis of more recent "color appearance" models that attempt to determine how the color should be reproduced in a new environment so it looks like it did in the old environment. There are a lot of things going on in the human visual system that affect these results, some of them very weird. For example, you might think that in a room lighted with orangey incandescent light bulbs, the TV reproduction should be adjusted to the same orangey white. (After all, a photograph seen in this light has all its colors biased towards orange.) But NO! when you do this to a TV, it looks way too orange - something more towards daylight-white color looks better.
NTSC, because of the phosphor changes, has for many years violated the first criterion of being able to accurately match colors over the whole range simultaneously(mostly that green phosphor change bieng compensated at the receiver instead of the transmitter, and a few other things like overly-blue white color, partial DC coupling in older sets, etc.). The phosphor errors mean that the viewer can match one or two colors to his/her preferred memory (usually fleshtones and near-by colors), while other colors have errors (strong reds too bright, cyans too dim)
PAL, and the new HDTV transmissions, at least get the color-matching capability reasonably in hand, so appearance adjustments can be made based on that. Since both the studio and the home viewer are then viewing the same reproduction, there is a chance for the artistic people to decide how they want things portrayed and get that result at home (or for the technical people to just be assured that the set-up is accurate). This standardization also makes possible the good results that are obtained with digital still cameras these days.
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