A transmission type color filter based on a thin film Ag-$SiO_2$-Ag etalon was proposed and realized in a quartz substrate. The device could acquire infrared suppressed transmission and wide effective area compared to costly e-beam lithography and laser interference lithography. The FDTD method was introduced to take into account the effect of the dispersion characteristics of the silver metal and the thickness thereof. Three different color filters were devised: The cavity length for the red, green and blue filters were 160 nm, 130 nm, and 100 nm respectively, with the metal layer unchanged at 25 nm. The observed center wavelengths were measured at 650 nm, 555 nm, and 480 nm for the red, green, and blue devices; the corresponding bandwidths were about 120 nm, 100 nm, and 120 nm; and the peak transmission for all was ~60%. Finally the relative transmission was measured to decline with the angle of the incident beam with the rate of 1%/degree.