Change in the value of with 100 different lines of sight (testing both noise and sample variance; green), 100 different noise realisations of a single line-of-sight (testing the importance of photometric noise; orange), 100 perfectly sampled spectroscopic catalogues (testing spectroscopic selection effects; purple), and 100 lines-of-sight excluding DEEP2 (testing the similarities to simulations and data; pink). The representations seen in the real KV450 data are also shown (black dashed lines). The distributions show that simulation is a reasonable match to the observed representations, being typically within ±5% of the representations seen in the data. We see that photometric noise dominates our observed misrepresentation, and that the MICE2 KV450-like spectroscopic compilation is typically ∼5% less representative of the full photometric sample, when compared to a perfectly sampled spectral catalogue (with the exception of bin 3). Thus the majority of the under-representation is caused by Poisson sampling and photometric noise.