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Rearranging Pixels For Performance
tepes writes "From bottomquark, A new method of sub-pixel rendering could make monitors cheaper to produce. ClairVoyante Laboratories developed the PenTile Matrix, which uses five sub-pixels instead of the typical three, to take advantage of the fact that the human eye is more sensitive to blue colors."
I wish I could do this for my appearance... I need help I say! Perhaps I could rearrange my hair to something that at least *looks* like something I like, and perhaps it could turn my khaki's to courd's.
i thought its green..
The human eye is least sensitive to blue. It it most sensitive to green, followed by red then blue. R
Blue schmoo... everything I every learned was that the human eye is more sensitive to GREEN...
This hardly seems like a huge saving and surely there will be cases when you can tell? I'll be paying the extra 40 dollars and having a standard display me thinks.
The magic recipe will eventually be hit upon - monitors and video screens of very high quality will be produced cheaply, and people will begin putting them everywhere.
There are many uses for ubiquitous screen technology. But the more video we see and watch during a day the closer we get to a certain question. Will the video representation of reality become more comfortable for people than the real thing?
Many people already see more TV than they do real world outdoor imagery during a day. What happens when we all do? At least one issue to consider is that the cultural norms for the appearance of a healthy, sexually appealing human being will have even more to do with TV than they do today.
Goat sex free since 2001
I am still waiting for this to happen...it seems that they might be getting closer with the technology, but what obstacles still need to be faced?
... the slightly muddy-looking Blue Screen of Death... for less!!
It may reduce cost in your traditional monitor, but does it give enough of a weight decrease to make monitors ubiquitous? Until we can reduce price and weight to such a point that monitors can, as horrifying as the thought may be to anyone with any ecological conscience, be a disposable item. I want my digital paper. I've been waiting 10 years. Will it be another 10?
Pax Digitalia
I can see this is probably going to be like mp3 compression, where people often say "I can tell the difference between that and the original". So, someone will have to develop something silly like "monitor drivers with more blue!"
-- Dan
As with all slashdot posts, the posting is inaccurate.
The human eye is *least* sensitive to blue... that's what this thing is about, sort of.
It's also not a new method of sub-pixel rendering.. it's a new method of sub-pixel layout.
The theory is that in a conventional LCD, there is too much blue.. it's wasted space, resources, etc.
This thing both changes the color proportion, and the way the thing is wired up. adjacent subpixels of the same color are driven by the same driver.
Won't this make fonts look even more fuzzy and have more "jaggies"? Why aren't there any 3072x2304 monochrome laptops available? Doesn't anyone else think it's a good goal to have dynamic paper-quality images rather than pixels we are able to casually count?
I'd rather pay a bit extra and have the option of using ClearType (or some other application that can exploit sub-pixel addressing).
Vx
It's not so much that we are less sensitive to blue.. that would seem to suggest you need MORE blue..
It's that we percieve blue at a lower resolution than the other colors, due to wavelength. (Ever seen blueblocker sunglasses? There is truth to that). So there is no reason to have the same resolution of R, G, and B, the extra resolution on B is wasted (not brightness, just resolution)
Isn't this the same technology/technique that Windows XP uses to smooth fonts on LCD displays (CLEARTYPE)???
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
it's FAKE! Sure the eye is more sensitive to blue light...but that means that we aren't really representing reality. Point a video camera at it, and the video camera doesn't lie, showes you the extra green / red, and when you put it through a normal monitor, it'll seem green/red-er (because of the less blue light). heLO. Doesn't anyone care about showing REALITY? It's like that MP3 Pro, making up the high notes. (Or the deep ones, too?) Sure it SOUNDS better, may even be cheaper, but it's not the TRUTH!
For a second, I got very excited because I thought it was a penile matrix. But it wasn't.
I'll stick with Microsoft's great ClearType technology. It doesn't seem like the two would be compatible, and anybody with eyeballs can see how fantastically Microsoft's solution is already working in the real world today. Time to trade in those gargantuan monitors that weigh more than you do, folks.
Briefly...
It is a really well written desription, it is a shame Design Engineering didn't have an writer that could understand it.
The human eye is less sensitive to blue.. That's why blue is often used as a background color, and why yellow (absense of blue) text on a white background is hard to read.
It's not due to the wavelength. The wavelengths of visible light are mesured in nano meters. Most LCD pixles are mesured in millimeters (well, fractions of mllimeters I guess)
The reason we need less resolution on blue is because blue isn't picked up by our eyes as well.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
In the printing industry there has been a big trumpetting of a new dot layout
called Hexachrome. This takes the concept of the human eye's propensity
for blurring colors together and adjusts the traditional 3 dot 3 color priniting
layout to 6 dots with a red dot, a blue dot, and 4 different types of yellow/green.
Personally, this looks like a migration from paper to the computer
industry of this same technique which affords more vibrant colors and
cleaner details.
--Ks9
The Clairvoyent page has been up since 1999. What's new about this?
Hello? We are a heartbeat away from 2002.
So, if this is SO wonderful, why haven't we already seen this on the market???
So now we get the lovely blury pixles of CRTs on LCD. Wonderfull.
Personaly, I'd rather stick with a nice crisp display.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I think you completely misunderstood what I meant.
Why do you think blue isn't picked up by your eyes as well? DUH! WAVELENGTH!
Blue does not focus at the same distance as the other colors, by enough of a margin to make excess blue make images seem fuzzy.
Sheesh.
Their sub-pixel addressing scheme replaces ClearType- just in case you missed that.
Design Engineering's 'article' looked like a cheap hack of a press release to me... If it wasn't, it was blatant plagarism- look at the wording of the two pages.
Quote from the article: "The human eye, however, perceives blue at a much lower resolution than red and green."
They're saying blue is the *worst*. Also, I think sensitvity is different than resolution.
"take advantage of the fact that the human eye is more sensitive to blue colors"
This is why the feminine species has not taken notice of my swoon-worthy masculinity-- 'tis for the fact that I am partial the lower frequencies.
It all makes sense now. . .
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to we
Rearranging the color pixels for color stealing is a reasonable idea, and making blue a little bigger is a nice tweak. Is it worth it? That's difficult to say. Subpixel rendering using color stealing on current LCDs actually does roughly put the extra resolution where you want it for high resolution text--vertical lines are the problem in small text, no horizontal lines.
I would be interested in any new technology which would reduce eye stress, seeing that I sit in front of a monitor for about 10hrs/wk. Does anybody know the impact of this development on my "end-of-the-workweek" blurry vision :)
Not only is the eye less sensitive to blue (as about 40 posts have pointed out), but have you ever noticed that the eye (at least mine) has more trouble focusing on blue? i.e. driving at night I'm always baffled by lit corporate signs that are a deep blue that just looks blurry and fuzzy, while a red sign at the same distance is crisp and clear. Of course it could be just a fault in my own eyes, but I've heard from other people who've noticed the same.
Okay, I agree that this technology is cool, but I think I would still opt for a traditional LCD display. I'm red-green colorblind, so I am most sensitive to blue, rather than red or green as this display assumes.
I'm surprised that nobody else has posted about colorblindness yet-- I was under the impression that more of us engineering types were affected!
For example, in the case of a 15' 1600 x 1200 UXGA panel
Good God man! This would look great behind a 12" stonehenge...
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
The human eye has two different types of photoreceptors called cones and rods. Cones
come in three variations for color vision.
But they don't perform too well in low light
conditions.
Rods can only perceive green or yellow light
and are much more sensitive.
That's why your color vision is reduced at
night and it's why it's so hard to see blue
stuff in low color conditions.
There are ~ 7^6 cones and 1.2^8 rods in the eye. I suspect that the spatial perception for blue color is reduced because the rods are pretty insensitive to blue. The rods are of course monochromatic. But the information from rods and cones is combined in the retina.
The winmoniter.
The current pixel size on monitor ranges from 0.24 to 0.19...
I don't believe that they wouldn't be able to have something close to that in any time soon...
Who controls the information, controls the world...
One of the first things I learned in photography was that reds and oranges appear to come toward the viewer, with violets and blues appear to move away from the viewer. A quick glance at a lot of the old Kodak advertisments and you will always see a red or orange in the foreground, and blues and greens as the background. This gives the feeling of depth on a flat image. Apply this to digital imaging and you have a jpg iwith what appears to have depth. In black and white it becomes a little more obvious by placing the lighter colors to the front, and the darker colors toward the back. I would have to assume that the same applies to colors on the screen, as color is still color regardless if it's reflective or projected. (as in CRT monitors)
Apparently the column drivers on an LCD cost more than the row drivers. I have no idea why, but I will accept that.
It may have to do with the order that the row and column are printed in. If the rows are printed first, and the LCD has defects at that point, you only lose the time and money that went into the first few steps. Then if the Columns are printed later, and the LCD has defects, you lose that much more time and process cost. Thus minimizing the complexity and reducing the chance of defects in later printing stages is a wise move, from an economical standpoint.
At the fab I briefly contracted for, no one cared if you dropped the US$10 raw wafers, but people flipped out if you dropped the US$300 processed wafers that came out of the implanter 8 hours later...
Won't this screw up Cleartype? At least until they have an option to support this particular sub-pixel organization. Does Cleartype support multiple sub-pixel orderings right now? Although this seems like it would be a bit more complex, since the ordering changes not just on the x axis, but is differently laid out on the y axis as well.
Sounds like an interesting problem. I wonder how much information modern lcd displays give the cpu about their sub-pixel layout.
Which brings me to another question -- I wonder if anyone has looked into designing an image format which contained extra data to allow sub-pixel display layout of the image? Or whether there are any image display programs that take advantage of sub-pixel layout when scaling. Or further, hardware scaling routines on laptops (for when you're at lower resolution) that use it. (On the other hand, images are probably more color sensitive than text, so this might not work nearly as well).
Well, random thoughts.
-Puk
Actualy the Human eye is 30% more sensitive to Green then Blue and Red. We can see more shades of green then any other colour. This is why Night Vision and HUD's on jets are Green.
In 1953, the National Television System Committee was given the task of implementing a 3:1 compression scheme that could be decoded with a couple of extra vacuum tubes. All the frequencies had been assigned to work with simple black and white televisions. Furthermore, the new color signals had to work with unmodified black and white television sets, a large existing installed base.
The engineering that they did for this was completely brilliant and used the same kind of reasoning about the perceptual properties of the human eye that this product does. It got the job done. And we've been suffering the consequences for fifty years. Anyone who has ever done serious animation for video knows about chroma crawl, notch and comb filters, antialiasing along several different color axes at once, yada yada yada.
With LCD's and decent CRT's, we've been able to get away from most of that, unless you really need to put your signal on a television set. And so now, to save a few bucks on something that is going quickly down in price anyway, we're going to be hobbled for another fifty years because of some "clever" idea? This is progress?
The point of the technology is to enable the manufacturing of cheaper, lower resolution displays that have the apparent resolution of higher resolution, normally constructed displays. Their technology only costs less because it uses fewer drivers to achieve the same *apparent* resolution. You also have the choice of spending slightly more on the construction of a display and ending up with somewhat higher *apparent* resolution.
Checking out the linked page, there are explanatory graphics midway down, but they're simply wrong. They show an enlarged letter A, (black on white) then show how that letter is formed on 'stripe' CRTs vs their tile system. The problem is that they have it reversed. They show the color phosphor dots on the black areas and the white areas are still white. The more fundamental difference here is that CRTs are additive, while LCD displays are subtractive, but they don't even go into that.
Worse, they base their assumptions of superiority on the misconception that striped CRT monitors have one trio of RGB stripes for each pixel. They don't even address the triangular RGB phosphor pattern that non-trinitron CRTs use.
In a nutshell, it sounds like a neat idea, but it's no panacea, and looks like it'll have many of the same edge-color problems that current CRTs do (Trinitron and non), only they'll be more obvious on 45deg angles of red and green surfaces, rather than 90deg angles. Take a look at the tile pattern, and see how the pattern does still have stripes, only they're rotated 45degrees right for green and 45 degrees left for red. I imagine a field of 100% blue will, on close inspection, be a thousand little points of light, since each one is surrounded by dark space that takes up 70% of the screen.
Of course, the proof is in the pudding. I wonder when they'll have samples at tradeshows.
Kevin Fox
Go ahead and ignore all but the first paragraph of my post. I was stupid.
The part about the 'A' graphic still stands though.
Kevin Fox
If they take advantage of how the eye views color, how does that affect those of us who are colorblind? I read somewhere that 1 in 10 males have some sort of color perception problem.
What makes column drivers more expensive is that they need to switch with a much higher freqency than the row drivers.
The second link (http://www.clairvoyante.com/what.html) actually has a nice little comparison. Just for fun, I'll give you the URI's for the pictures along with the text to them:
http://www.clairvoyante.com/StripedArend.gif (Conventional rendering on RGB Stripe panel)
http://www.clairvoyante.com/StripedARed.gif (Sub-pixel rendering on RGB Stripe panel)
http://www.clairvoyante.com/PentileA.gif (Sub-pixel rendering on PenTile Matrix(TM))
I continue to be amazed at the stupidity/ineptness of people.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Microsoft has a bullshit patent on sub pixel rendering of text on LCD screens. I'll bet going to another pixel layout circumvents it and lets other companies write sub pixel rendering drivers without getting sued by big evil.
God, those patents are dumb. Of course you could find prior art, like the way every Apple II programmer drew fonts. I played with sub pixel rendering on my first color laptop just because it was such an obvious thing to try and it used to be my job to play with graphics...
Oh well enough whining. I'm a hypocrite, anyway. If my company puts my name on any software patents I won't complain about it, I'll be too busy wondering if that means that I'm getting a raise.
Rocky J. Squirrel
and yet some web designers (such as ones at Intel) doesn't take that into account...
I know its cheap but this is actually +1 interesting and +1 informative of all the stuff on here.
I note the date on the ClairVoyante web page is 1999. They've had this for a while, and still nothing's coming of it....
It's only when they're married, and they try to dress themselves, that the color blindness becomes apparent.
More seriously, the military used to 4F you if you were color blind, and now they realize that color blind people are less easily foiled by camouflage.
Anyone who has done focusing on a large CRT projector can tell you the blue tube is a biatch. No matter how sharp you get the focus on blue the lines always appear fuzzy.
This is where I keep my clever quotes "" Yup I only got a pair, so I better not waste em!
You probably experienced presbyopia, which is the gradual loss of flexibility in your lenses, thus making near items harder to focus on. This is a normal process that occurs with age.
Admittedly, looking at a monitor all day long can cause eyestrain, especially if you tend toward hyperopia (farsightedness) to begin with. That's my problem: While I can see all right at distances of a couple feet from my face and beyond, my eye muscles have to strain constantly, even when I'm focused at infinity, and working on a computer screen all day every day makes the strain get really bad if I'm not wearing my glasses.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
The sciences of plastic surgery, drugs and diet won't exactly be standing still either.
But keep in mind, it's only the shallow 95% that'll need it, so who cares?
They have it right - they know that we're insensitive to blue. If you read the description, you'll notice that pixels are defined as two green and two red dots. The idea is that the green and red dots will define the edges of the pixel, and the blue dot just adds color information. That's pretty clever. I wonder if some graphics will get a "blue halo" effect as the blue dots are lit up around the perimeter of a shape. It's probably not caught on, because it would require writing custom drivers for every OS out there. You'd have to write one thing to display the regular dots, and another thing to handle subpixel rendering for text.
Look at such screens from 2 ft long enough and soon you won't be able to discern the individual pixels without corrective optics!
Genetic condition? I doubt it. Unless something really went wrong in Singapore. Myopia seems almost endemic there. http://www.snec.com.sg/cec/childhood_myopia.htm
:(.
Myopia appears to be a result of too much "near work" - e.g. reading, watchmaking, embroidery. More environmental factors. Based on what I've observed that seems to be a far more plausible explanation.
There could be a genetic predisposition to _developing_ myopia after too much "near work". But "near work" seems to be the trigger. In fact I think it could be the other way round - e.g. some lucky people have genetic predisposition to not get myopia even after lots of "near work". So far scientists/doctors need to explore more on how a human eye develops/grows and maintains focus during that growth I believe they will find answers there - there are probably feedback loops and lots of close work could screw them up.
Personally I am not an eye doctor but I think that more kids are learning how to read at earlier ages, and their arms are just too short to put books at appropriate focal lengths comfortably! "Hold book 1.5-2 feet away" Yeah right, not easy when your arms aren't even that long, esp for precocious kids.
Someone should create special reading optics for those kids! Too late for me tho
Better color printers for computers are six colors now. Finally, you can get saturated reds.
None of this applies to light-emitting screens, which really are additive.
There are many uses for ubiquitous screen technology. But the more video we see and watch during a day the closer we get to a certain question. Will the video representation of reality become more comfortable for people than the real thing?
In the introduction to his book "Strange Wine," Harlan Ellison discusses this very topic, and relates several pertinent anecdotes, including some from teachers.
One teacher who had monitors and a camera in his classroom found that the students watched him on the monitors, and not directly.
Another teacher found that turning the monitors on, even if they only showed static, would get the students' attention and quiet them down.
Harlan took this as evidence that the kids were watching what was _more real_ to them, and that TV had supplanted real life as their primary mode of experience. He came at this with several other anecdotes from various positions (people who couldn't distinguish between actors and the characters they played, people who thought that TV movies showed the _actual_ events portrayed, and so on).
rearranging neurons for performance
I don't like this layout. With the original triangular layout you could always find a triangle red Green and Blue. Using this layout you will not alway get blue next to green. I think this will show up in the final product.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that