New 20" iMac Screens Show 98% Fewer Colors

Trintech points us to an AppleInsider article about another class-action lawsuit directed against Apple Inc. This one claims that the displays on new 20" iMacs are only capable of 6-bit-per-pixel color, 98% fewer colors than Apple advertises. Rather than the 8-bit, in-plane switching (IPS) screens used in 24" iMacs and earlier 20" models, "[t]he new 20-inch iMac features a 6-bit twisted nematic film (TN) LCD screen," according to the article, "which the [law] firm claims is the 'least expensive of its type,' sporting a narrower viewing angle than the display of the 24-inch model, less color depth, less color accuracy, and greater susceptibility to washout." Apple recently settled a very similar class-action suit about the displays on MacBook and MacBook Pro models.

Comments

No April Fools articles this year.

[suso]

Good job slashdot, I think you successfully managed to show that reality is stranger than fiction by holding back on the fake articles this year. And you've thoroughly confused everyone.

Re:No April Fools articles this year.

[shaitand]

OMG PONIES!!

Re:No April Fools articles this year.

[mapsjanhere]

It's 6 bit per color in a rgb scheme, making it 18 bit or 262,144 total.

Re:No April Fools articles this year.

[pwnies]

You called?

Re:No April Fools articles this year.

[pipatron]

Technically, you could only define 32 colours of those 64 (from a total palette of 4096!), the other 32 were actually the same colour but at half the brightness, hence the name of the display mode: EHB - Extra Half-Brite. This was very useful since you could use that extra bit-plane as a shadow-plane, and most palettes had dark and bright versions of the colours anyway.

Of course, this doesn't make it any less superior, just saying...

Re:No April Fools articles this year.

[Firehed]

It may be weird, but it's also remarkably common. About half the LCDs on Newegg are reported as showing 16m or 16.2m colors, rather than 16.7m (2^24). A far cry from the 280k-odd colors of a 6-bit-per-channel display, but the number they're reporting is based off of the results of a 6-bit panel using dithering. Many cheaper screens from all manufacturers follow this trend, especially those advertised towards gamers. They sacrifice color reproduction in order to get the pixels to twist faster - all of the reported 2ms panels are 6-bit dithered displays, which gives awful color reproduction (not critical for games most of the time, but a big problem for photo/video work). Of course, anything faster than 16ms is absolutely pointless since you're dealing with a 60Hz signal, but that's aside the point. More notably, the 6-bit panels are quite a bit cheaper, as one would expect.

I'm almost positive that my Macbook Pro does this as well; honestly, quite unacceptable for a "pro" machine. It's especially noticeable at the brighter edge of a gradient (ex. the Photoshop color palette).

Most people aren't going to really notice. Dithering is reasonably effective, and it still manages to give the illusion of most of the spectrum (certainly far more than 6-bit/64 levels per channel, rather than 8-bit/256). But at the end of the day it's still an illusion, and the difference IS there.

Re:No April Fools articles this year.

[badasscat]

Thanks for the clarification. I was sitting here and thinking to myself, "That can't bee right. 6-bits of color is how much my RGB Amiga 500 used in 1987 (64 colors)."

No offense intended, but I can't believe in this day and age that people who are otherwise generally well-versed in computers and computer peripherals are still not even aware of this specification for LCD screens - which is probably the most important one.

Everybody gets so fixated on response times and viewing angles, but none of that amounts to a hill of beans without color rendition and accuracy. The most important specs to look at on any LCD screen are bits per pixel and gamut. Contrast is also useful to know if you also know black level threshold. Without that, though, contrast ratio is useless because it's much easier to make an LCD screen brighter than it is to make one darker, and LCD screens these days are by and large capable of much more brightness than would ever be usable. A contrast ratio of 10,000:1 is meaningless without knowing the starting point for that range.

Unfortunately, most manufacturers make the specs that are actually important almost impossible to find. Even a lot of manufacturers who could brag about these things - because their screens do all the right things in color rendition and accuracy - choose not to. Dell, for example, is probably the largest manufacturer of 8bpp Super-IPS screens with wide color gamuts. Their higher-end screens, which are still pretty cheap relative to most screens marketed towards professionals, are among the more capable out there. But I have never seen Dell actually try to make this argument - I have never seen them argue that colors on their monitors are more vibrant and true-to-life (to use the marketing-speak that they'd probably go with), even though they could.

The reason is that people don't seem to know or care. And they should. You're looking at a screen in some cases almost every waking hour you have (if you're like me and work on computers, then go home and switch on your laptop), and many people are using them for things like photo editing or home video production. People should be demanding good color rendition.

It's almost shocking that Apple, of all companies, does not provide 8bpp panels across their entire line. At the very least, given their reputation as a manufacturer of computers for creative professionals, they should be making it clear which screens are 8bpp panels and which ones aren't. And they should be publishing their screens' gamut as well.

If anything...

[MrNemesis]

...the new OSX interface has shown us that we don't need so many colours. Colours in a computer eat up the memory bits and distract us from our reverence. Personally, I'm going to take Steve's advice and go get my eyes chromed.

Can't say I'm surprised.

[DurendalMac]

I work at an Apple shop, I love Apple products, but I'd be happy to tell you how shitty the 20" Aluminum iMac screens are. They really, really suck, and here's hoping Apple finally gets their head out of their ass and puts a quality screen on what should be a quality product.

That's OK

[Lxy]

640 colors ought to be enough for anyone.

Re:How can you judge colour quality?

[xlsior]

Pretty much any monitor advertised as 16.2 million colors is using a 6 bit panel with hardware dithering. Those advertised as 16.7 million colors tend to be 8 bit.

Re:If only...

[Haeleth]

the Windows Guy could retaliate in one of those commercials.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Windows PCs (including pretty much every laptop ever made) also use these "inferior" screens, and nobody's tried to sue Dell yet.

The fact is that most people can't tell the difference, and aren't interested in paying four times as much to get a product that isn't noticably better unless you make your living working with colour.

This is a storm in a teacup.

Apple monitors give o1000000 colors

[davidwr]

Apple uses octal.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[vux984]

Mod parent up. This is absolutely true. I'd estimate that the vast majority of LCD panels on the market are 6-bit screens. Whether you are buying Benq, LG, Dell, Viewsonic, it doesn't matter. Most of them are 6 bit.

They are cheaper, and they have faster response times.

8-bit LCD panels are almost a niche specialty 'pro product' in today's market, and unless you went out of your way to buy an 8 bit screen odds are you took home a 6-bit TN panel, advertised as showing "16.2 million colours" without even knowing it.

Its not just Apple. Although they seem to have gone beyond marketing deceptiveness to outright lies and deserve to be taken to task about it.

But don't for a minute think all those free Dell monitors bundled with low end PCs are anything better. Hell, even the ones you can pay to upgrade to aren't often anything better than 6-bit.

Re:Only 766 colours anyway.

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Even a screen with an 8-bit DAC is only capable of displaying 766 colours - each subpixel can show 255 brightnesses of three distinct wavelengths of light (as each subpixel can show the same black this makes 766, not 768)

Let's start with, it's multiplicative, not additive. That's 255^3, not 255*3. This is because, as you mentition later, the eye combines all three subpixels into a new color.

And if you want to get really picky, you can only display three colours

If you interpert color as a wavelenght of light as opposed to relative excitment of the three colored cones in your eye, then yes. But no one thinks of that definition. Instead, the obvious usage is 'colors preceived'. Even when you talk about color of a pure wavelength, you can only interpert it as combinations of your three cones.

Whether an individual subpixel can display 256 levels is quite irrelevant since dithering is capable of producing a higher colour depth at the expense of colour resolution

So, even if one were to concede all your points, these aren't really 1920x1280x24 displays are they then. Because that 1920x1280 resolution has to get shortchanged for the dithering. So you can say that Apple lied about the resolution instead of the color if you like, but it's awful pedantic.

Yes, it is possible to build CCDs where the R, G and B are cosited, nobody actually uses the Foveon sensor because the difference in the capture picture is not discernable.

I know people who paid a lot more to get a camera with a Foveon sensor, actually. While I might be unable to notice the quality, they (and their clients) can. And you better believe they would be pissed if they ended up with a Bayer filter instead.

If you want to say that the difference is small, and unnoticible to most people, so that is the optimal thing to make, fine. I respect that, and agree with you. But this is flagrant false advertising. A 1920x1280x24 screen was advertised and not delivered. Bitch about Apple's behavior just like any other major company's.

This is not as big of a travesty as it seems

[Cowclops]

I'm the guy that you'd find arguing over how much LCDs suck and how much better CRTs are a couple years ago. But my CRT died last month (Mitsubishi 19" Aperture Grille, it was about the best monitor you could get short of the 22" version of the same), and I picked up a Samsung 226CW. There are only two things it doesn't do as well as the CRT:

Absolute black level.
Off-axis viewing degradation.

The color is actually BETTER, DESPITE the 6 bit panel. The reason why 6 bit is not a big deal is because the panel response is so fast that it can temporally dither two colors into one, and you don't even notice that its doing it. For photography, its actually better color reproduction because its more consistent than CRT. On top of that, the "C" model in particular (as opposed to the 226BW) has a 95 CRI backlight, which means the spectrum the backlight produces is much less peaky and closer to natural sunlight. Altogether, the result is more accurate color than I'd get on a CRT. Plus I get 2ms response time so gaming is fine too.

The 226CW may be TN, but its one of the best panels out there. I thought I was going to be more disappointed than I actually was. In fact, I wasn't disappointed at all because it turned out better in most regards, not just "almost as good." It can produce smooth color because spatial and temporal dithering on fast monitors is surprisingly effective, and its actually more accurate because of the better quality back light.

Not that this was an article about CRT vs LCD, but I'm saying that TN panels have become common not just BECAUSE they're cheap but because the good ones (as cheap as they are) are SURPRISINGLY good. Apple may have used a shitty 6 bit panel instead of, say, Samsung's 6 bit panel, but the number of native colors is surprisingly not that big a deal, even if you're a picture-accuracy freak.

(It doesn't excuse them from not clarifying whether it was TN or IPS though, and in fact it pisses me off that no manufacturers are clear on what overall technology goes into their LCDs)

Yet Steve Jobs does not care about it

[Orion Blastar]

because he is colorblind. That is why the original Macintosh and Lisa were in black and white with shades of gray. It wasn't that it was cheaper, it was that Steve Jobs is colorblind. 6-bit or 8-bit color, it all looks the same to Steve Jobs.

On the other hand, Windows and PCs are the way they are because Bill Gates has asperger syndrome.

Linux is the way it is because Linus Torvalds worked his way through college as a nude model for art students to paint or draw pictures of the human body. That is why Linux is open, totally naked.