A new colour appearance data set for transmissive media was collected through psychophysical experiments. Five experimental phases with different luminance levels and back-ground luminance factors were conducted in dark surround conditions. Three of the phases were performed at high luminance level, i.e. luminance of reference white above 3300 cd/m². The magnitude estimation method was used with an experimental set-up similar to the classical LUTCHI experiments. Sixteen observers participated to give a total of 10500 estimations. The lightness, colourfulness and hue of 50 test colours were judged. Observer performance was evaluated in terms of repeatability and accuracy of the observers. Colour appearance changes due to luminance level and background luminance factor were analyzed. Five colour appearance models – CIELAB, Hunt94, CIECAM97s, CIECAM02 and Kwak03 – were tested by using the colour appearance data set. Except for CIELAB, all models performed well in terms of the ability to predict the mean visual data and successfully predicted lightness and colourfulness changes under different luminance levels and backgrounds. CIECAM02 showed best overall performance amongst models.