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Palm Ships With 12-bit Screen, Says 16-Bit On Box

Posted by timothy on from the short-memories dept.

Launch was among the many readers to point out that "Palm recently announced that they made a mistake in their product description of the m130... it doesn't have the 16-bit screen they advertised. Rather then admit the mistake, Palm is using every ounce of their spinning power to mislead its less tech-savy customers into believing that the palm m130 can display 58,621 'color combinations' rather then the 'more than 65,000 colors' it had previously stated; only a 11% difference. This tricky language is meant to shade the fact that a 12-bit screen can only display 4,096 colors... that's a 93% difference." Have they not learned from the mistakes of history? On the other hand, the screen resolution is 160x160 pixels.

3 of 315 comments (clear)

  1. aw cmon by tanveer1979 · · Score: 0, Troll

    Thats just 4 bits man, and so much hue and cry.. people have run away with millions of dollars, sure cant we let palm dearie to have 4 itsy bitsy teeny weeny bits?
    And if you want colours GeForce is always there ;-)

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  2. Re:93% difference by ajs · · Score: 2, Troll

    The difference will not show in most of the productivity apps that are popular on palm devices, but the new big push, and certainly my reason for wanting color on a palmtop is the Web. Browsing the Web with a 12-bit pallette is going to hurt.

    Try this. XFree86 allows -depth settings of 5, 15 and 16 among others. Try firing up a server under 16 bits. Bring up a browser and view a few sites. Then re-start the server at 15 bits and see the massive difference. Now imagine that difference magnified by a factor of 8! 12 bit display would really suck.

    And all that assumes average Web needs. If you work with color-sensitive applications (no, Timmy pr0n is not the only thing that needs rich color), the palmtop becomes worthless for previewing someone's work while you're on the run.

  3. Really only has three colors! by Insightfill · · Score: 0, Troll
    When you get down to it, most LCD screens (and CRTs, IIRC) really only show three colors RGB. I'm willing to accept that frame-rate-control (that is: flickering) can make the intensity change, but everyone really is using dithering to produce the rest of the colors.

    Keep moving closer to the screen as you read this to confirm.

    So yes, red is one of those colors.