A Billion-Color Display

The Future of Things covered the introduction last month of HP's DreamColor display, with 30 bits/pixel, developed in conjunction with DreamWorks Animation. The display is aimed at the video production, animation, and graphic arts industries. HP promises blacker blacks and whiter whites — though TFoT quotes one source who notes that if they deliver this, it will be due to the back-lighting and not to the number of bits/pixel. No word on the size of the displays that will actually be delivered, or on the price.

Comments

To what end?

[Eudial]

Is it really possible to improve screens further, in a way that's visible to the naked eye? It's the same with high end audio system. I sure can't tell the difference between a mid price-range audio system and a bleeding edge $50,000 system.

My point is that 24 bpp ought to be enough for anyone.

Re:To what end?

[Ethan Allison]

If you're doing graphics, you often have to make edits on tiny things that aren't perceptually different unless you're zoomed really far in but have an impact on things as a whole. Which is important if you're making a movie on an eight-figure budget.

Re:To what end?

[Ethan Allison]

Also, "well the old one is all people should need" is never an excuse to stop innovating.

Re:To what end?

[gEvil (beta)]

And yet that 24bpp can't reproduce the full range of colors that can be printed on a piece of paper. And the ink on that piece of paper can't reproduce the full range of colors visible to the naked eye. Yes, there's room for a whole lot of improvement. That's not to discount the progress we've already made (24bpp is pretty impressive), but there's still a long way to go.

Re:To what end?

[Anonymous Coward]

Current displays are lacking in several areas:

• They display only a portion of visible light, limited by the RGB color space.
• The dynamic range of ca 1:1000 is far from the 1:100000 which is commonly observed in real life.
• A lack of bit depth allows only 256 shades of gray. This can easily produce banding.

So yes, you would definitely be able to tell the difference between today's displays and displays that can reproduce the full range of visible light.

Re:To what end?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm, most medical imaging modalities digitize into 12 or 16 grey-scale bits. 30-bit RGB would get a whole lot closer than 24 to rendering w/o introducing down-sampling artifacts... 'course if you want your MRI for neuro-surgical planning done cheaper we can put the image on an 8-bit color mapped (say 10 grey levels, 245 colors used for web browser) or even 565 rgb. The only people I know of for whom eye strain is worse than for graphic artists are radiologiests -- thousands and thousands of images a day and it really matters if you end up missing something due to fatigue.

Re:To what end?

[smallfries]

There are two main ways to improve over a standard system and the summary sounds as if they've done both. The contrast range on a normal screen is in the order of 500:1. On a bright sunny day outdoors our eyes pick up contrast ratios that are 1000s of times larger. The claim about blacker blacks and whiter whites will be a reference to High Dynamic Range.

Once you increase the range of colours that you are going to display it means the gaps between distinct colours become larger and so more bits are required to compensate. I'm way too lazy to actually look at the "article" but they've probably shifted from a fixed point representation for colour components to a floating-point one. This produces a colour-space that maps much better onto what we perceive.

Re:To what end?

[plantman-the-womb-st]

You know, you are absolutely correct. I for one am really glad that we still see inovation in the whalebone corset fields as well as Flint Chipping (tm) Now! technology.

OR!

We could agree that yes, these flat display screens we already have work great and really improving them further is a bit of overkill and instead direct our inovative talents at something new.

Perhaps you just don't like the design of your wheels and really want to see a better one, perhaps this time based on the square instead of the circle, developed?

Re:To what end?

[Harmonious Botch]

Also, "well the old one is all people should need" is never an excuse to stop innovating. Yes, you should have your eyeballs upgaded immediately!

Re:To what end?

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet that 24bpp can't reproduce the full range of colors that can be printed on a piece of paper. Also worth noting that the colors that can be printed on a piece of paper also cannot reproduce the full range of colors that can be seen on screen.

Both have color gamuts with areas that lay outside of one-another.

Re:To what end?

[pablomme]

They display only a portion of visible light, limited by the RGB color space. That's not cured by adding more bits to an RGB system. But anyway, would humans see a difference?

A lack of bit depth allows only 256 shades of gray. This can easily produce banding. This display has 10 bits per colour channel, which gets you 1024 shades of grey (well, yeah, 1022). Does anyone know how many shades of grey the human eye can distinguish?

Re:To what end?

[KiloByte]

If you're doing graphics, you often have to make edits on tiny things that aren't perceptually different unless you're zoomed really far in but have an impact on things as a whole. Yeah, but you don't need these displayed. Having the in-memory image have a better resolution or a better color depth is a good idea, but I would leave showing the details for when you actually zoom it in.

Accurately showing red as red and blue as blue is an entirely different story, not related to bit depth.

Re:To what end?

[Divebus]

Is it really possible to improve screens further, in a way that's visible to the naked eye?

Just as in audio where quantizing becomes a problem only in very low level passages, fine greyscale, especially in the blackest image areas, will benefit from more bits/pixel.

For example, an ordinary CD (16 bits) can sound rather gritty on quiet recordings such as the low level passages of classical music. That's because you're probably only using two or three bits of sample depth down there. To combat the issue, 24 bit audio will elevate the sample depth everywhere but will show itself best at low levels. Dither (essentially noise) is used to randomize and mask the problem, but that's a cheat.

In video, fine greyscale performance comes from higher bit depth per pixel and is visible throughout the entire luminance range. The issue shows itself on flat (un-textured) areas with minute lighting changes across the surface, like a softly lit painted wall. You'll see annular rings on the surface as the bit values step through their range. Again, dither may be used to randomize the quantized transitions.

24 bit video is really 8 bits per primary color - so it's not that good to start with. In professional application, it's not unusual to work with 10 bit [per channel] or even up to 16 bit[per channel] images, mostly to be more friendly to post production.

Fortunately, analog humans are fairly blind to minute color changes. Unfortunately, our system of digital video happily shows you everything wrong with it.

Re:To what end?

[moosesocks]

Although today's monitors are fairly good at color reproduction, they could easily benefit from extra dynamic range, which LCDs have never been particularly good at. Although the article lacks technical depth, it can be inferred that the extra 6 bits will be used as an alpha channel, to adjust the brightness of each pixel, which should comfortably solve the dynamic range problem once and for all if it works.

Similarly, in the visual arts industry, it is absolutely necessary for an image on the screen to look as close as possible to the final product on print or in film. It is also important for these colors to be consistent between systems, especially when multiple artists are working on the same project.

It might be a niche industry, but if HP are able to improve the status quo, they should be able to sell more than a few. The fact that they've hinted that these improvements will be inexpensive to implement simply translates to a benefit for everyday folks.

Also, in terms of how much room screens have to improve, take at the print in a phone book or the financials section of a newspaper. Then compare that to the smallest font you can comfortably read on your monitor.

Even for boring business applications, there are many benefits to be had from higher-resolution displays.

Re:To what end?

[Torvaun]

I did, with clear plastic add-ons. I've got a friend who went with the laser upgrade.

Re:To what end?

[fishbowl]

I think you underestimate the capacity of human perception of dynamic range.
There is the measure of what the brain can be persuaded to disregard, and there
is the limit of perception. These are different things.

You can very easily perceive the difference between dynamic range in high-end professional video versus dynamic range in reality. Just look in the shadows. Or try to photograph flames. Or ice. What you call the threshold of human perception, is actually very far from the real threshold.

Limited dynamic range is a good thing because storage space and broadcast bandwidth are finite, and because the brain will disregard loss of detail, so the compromise is acceptable.

So you're right -- YOU probably don't need the added expense of rendering images in greater bit depth, but that does not mean the technology is useless. As with all such technology, also there is a world of difference between what the leaf node of the consumer requires, and what is desirable on the production side.

Re:To what end?

[moosesocks]

Modern monitors use an additive method of color blending, while printers (by their very nature) must use subtractive blending.

The range of colors that can be reproduced by a 24-bit RGB device is always going to be different from the range of colors that a 24-bit CMY device can reproduce.

By the same note, a 24-bit RGB display can produce colors that the CMY printer cannot.

One color space isn't bigger than the other; they're simply different. Once you increase the bit-depth far enough to encompass the full spectrum of visible light for both color spaces, the distinction can finally be dropped.

Re:To what end?

[davolfman]

I'd just be happy if the manufacturers told me the panel technology in the specs so I could avoid 6-bit TN displays.

As it is, 10 bit displays are nothing new. Photographers have been swearing by them for years as they allow for the response curve of the display to be corrected without dipping below 256 displayable tones per channel. Of course the real solution is just to get someone to manufacture CRTs again. For this kind of market an analog display technology has a serious advantage in that there are no rounding errors.

Re:To what end?

[Harmonious Botch]

And you see more colors now?

Re:To what end?

[Torvaun]

Nope, just higher resolution.

Re:To what end?

[somersault]

Reminds me of one of the couple of times I went scuba diving in the sea. I don't think I've ever seen colours so bright as some of the plants on the bottom of the sea bed that day (and this was on a dull stormy day in west-coast Scotland, which is hardly very exotic!). When you take stuff like stones and weeds out of the water suddenly they look very dull.. I wonder what the difference is.. maybe something to do with the refraction of the light going from the water to the glass to air into my eyeballs upping the contrast or something? :P

Re:To what end?

[RalphBNumbers]

Afaik, the fact that a 24bbp display can't reproduce all visible colors has more to do with the fact that the display's pixels are made up of 3 monochromatic sub-pixels than the fact that there are 8-bits of information for each of those sub-pixels. Just adding 2 extra bits for each of those 3 colors isn't going to do much in terms of spectrum coverage iirc.

I'd actually be interested in seeing research into displays that didn't use distinct pixels at all, and instead went with something like a bayer pattern composed of monochromatic elements of more than 3 colors. The advantages of easy sub-pixel rendering, and simple 1:1 display of computed pixels, become less relevant with the high dpi displays we can make these days imho. It would be a good idea to look at more exotic layouts to make use of increasing pixel densities.

Re:To what end?

[DAldredge]

How many shades of gray can that 24 bit display show? Hint - the answer is 254.

Re:To what end?

[Vampyre_Dark]

We've already moved well beyond 24 bit color spaces for higher end graphics work. Even video games often use floating point buffers with more than 8 bits per channel to do certain things instead of 8. The problem isn't with the final resulting image not having enough colors, it's getting to that final result.

16.7 million colors is a lot, but it's not a lot for any particular shade. You end up with lots of banding patterns or rounding errors when adding different colors together.

Don't forget that a lot of current displays can't support the 16.7 range already, or don't do the best job of handling it 1:1.

As for your audio argument. I have albums that I have re-bought that were remastered at a higher bit depth and then sampled back down to 16 bits, and they sound a lot better than my old copies. It's like night and day.

There is never enough bits for anyone, ever. Having a display that supports more colors is a god thing if your work will benefit from it.

Re:To what end?

[ceoyoyo]

Not really. I've seen some 12-bit grayscale monitors. They used to buy them for the radiologists. Most of the radiologists now use regular (good quality, but still 24-bpp) LCDs. The contrast ratio on a monitor is MUCH more important. Contrast ratio expands the colour gamut while increased bit depth just lets you move through your existing gamut in smaller steps.

Re:To what end?

[ceoyoyo]

Not in 30 bits they haven't. That's only 10 bits per channel (compared to 8 in a regular screen). There's a reason you don't see 10 bit floating point numbers much.

Re:To what end?

[cheater512]

I thought we had decided the whole Gillette thing wasnt innovating? :P
This is just adding more detail to the colours.

Re:To what end?

[LiquidCoooled]

Ok, an incrimental improvement where the additional bits of information (2 bits per gun) is used to control the intensity of the LED backlight for that pixel sounds like a massive improvment.

Especially when you consider that black is not black on most monitors.

Re:To what end?

[mikael]

Higher dot pitches, more bits per pixel sample (even floating-point displays, higher contrast between black and white colors, larger framebuffer resolution, larger monitor size, 3D focus-to-infinity/stereo views without the need for headsets.

Maybe even laptops with twin LCD displays, that could be folded outwards, along with a keyboard with a foldout numeric keypad.

Re:To what end?

[mikael]

The red and green ranges of the spectrum are reduced under seawater. So you see a higher contrast in the blue range. M

It's the same with pebbles - when they are dry, they are just stones, but once wet, light greys become black, and you see all the specks and lines of minerals.

Re:To what end?

[evanbd]

Your eye only has 3 color sensors. Therefore you can reproduce any spectrum in a way that your eye will see as equivalent with only 3 color elements. That said, RGB doesn't do a perfect job of this -- there are some colors at the edges of the color space that your eye can see that RGB can't produce.

Now, it's entirely possible that the easiest way to produce the full spectrum when it comes to actually building a display is with more than 3 different color elements, but 3 is sufficient if they're the right 3 (RGB isn't quite).

Re:To what end?

[DirtySouthAfrican]

You probably can't distinguish the two colours placed side by side, but consider the following *Bill Nye voice*: With larger displays and larger resolutions, pure gradients suffer from banding quite quickly, and you need to resort to dithering and the like to make images acceptable. 256 shades of gray look pretty awful on a 1920 pixel display.

Re:To what end?

[somersault]

Aye, I'd noticed the same of pebbles, they look better at the beach :P I got some nice polished marble stones so that I don't have to keep them wet all the time.. thanks for the info about under the sea. I remember the green being especially vivid for some reason though.

Re:To what end?

[HateBreeder]

instead direct our inovative talents at something new. You know, these are all parallel efforts. Different people have different interests, and the people who will innovate screen design can't just "divert" their talent towards, say, stem cell research.

Some people, don't want or simply can't innovate.. so would you suggest they just stop whatever it is they're doing because we "don't need" any more incremental improvements?

From my point of view... every little helps and this is not waste. Having them doing nothing would be a waste.

Re:To what end?

[osu-neko]

You probably can't distinguish the two colours placed side by side

Depends on the two colors. I can't see the border between a patch of #010101 and #020202, but invert the same image and I can easily see the border between the patch of #FEFEFE and #FDFDFD.

Re:To what end?

[RalphBNumbers]

You're almost right... which is to say, wrong.
There are 3 types of cone receptors, and 3 numbers is sufficient to describe any color the human eye can perceive, but those 3 numbers can not represent actual physical colors.

Your cones do not just detect one monochromatic color, each type has it's own response curve across varying frequencies, and they're not even nice simple bell curves (one even has two peaks). To represent the entire visible color space with 3 numbers, as the CIE 1931 XYZ color space does, you need to allow things like negative luminance, that don't exist in the real world.

As you can see here, using three colors you can represent a subset of what is actually visible, represented as a triangle within the chromacity diagram. If you used a set of 5 monochromatic colors instead, you could represent a larger subset of the full visible range, which could be visualized as a pentagon in that chromacity diagram (and, of course, using even more colors would let you add more points to the shape representing the colors you can display, letting it conform even more closely to the full range of visible colors).

Re:To what end?

[dgatwood]

Flat panels today almost all suck at color reproduction. It's rare to even approach 24-bit color. My laptop is, I believe, an 18-bit panel. You can see massive banding if you look at anything with gradients. They use those cheap panels not because of cost but because they have better contrast than panels with more accurate color. If they can get the contrast ratio to something even halfway usable with 30-bit color, we'll see 24-bit color with enough contrast to be used in real-world environments. If so, then even though most people will never need or use a 30-bit panel, they will see the benefits of these panels in the form of panels with lower color depth sucking a lot less than they currently do.

Re:To what end?

[pablomme]

Funny. Just tried it and I can see the difference between #010101 and #020202 but not between #fefefe and #fdfdfd. I would have guessed it's dark colours that one can distinguish better, as in my case..

Re:To what end?

[Mozk]

When I disable mine, it's like a big guassian blur is applied.

Re:To what end?

[UncleTogie]

Especially when you consider that black is not black on most monitors.

Unless they've a backlight for each individual pixel, black still won't be black on this monitor, either...

Re:To what end?

[sjames]

No amount of zooming will make your eyes capable of telling the difference between 30 and 24 bit/pixel color.

Re:To what end?

[MaWeiTao]

Actually, the color gamut for CMYK is generally smaller than RGB. A CMYK print out on its own looks perfectly fine, but place it beside a computer monitor or an actual photo and suddenly the colors look a bit muted and in some cases slightly off. Depending on the nature of a particular project there sometimes is a lot of work involved in getting CMYK-based colors to look right.

One limitation with current displays in reproducing true to life color is that the image is being reproduced by a light source. And RGB is still limited compared to all the colors we can perceive.

Increased color depth doesn't really address the issue of limited gamut because all it does is allow for a finer variation of colors within the gamut. What I'd say would really improve color reproduction would be to add additional color pixels. There's a precedent for it, at least in printing. Some consumer printers, in fact, have cartridges which include more vibrant versions of cyan and magenta to enhance color. Whether this would be feasible on a display, however, I really don't know.

Existing displays, even high-end televisions are a long way off from being at a point where we can't distinguish an image from real life. A human can distinguish very minute variations in colors and the smallest details. And let's not forget that pixels become quite distinct and visible on large displays even at 1080p.

I'll never understand people who insist improving a particular technology is pointless merely because they've underestimated the capabilities of the human body.

Re:To what end?

[dabraun]

You are assuming that it can actually display "black" and "white" and I assure you it can not.

Re:To what end?

[colmore]

Different people have different needs.

I'm assuming that if Dreamworks is making this request then it is because their guys have a use for it. I'm at least curious.

But no,

"I have no need for this! It shouldn't exist!"

that makes more sense.

Re:To what end?

[sydbarrett74]

If you don't like it, don't buy it. People can innovate in whatever field they want. The fact that you don't approve is utterly irrelevant.

Re:To what end?

[evanbd]

On the contrary. Go create a single-color or grayscale smooth one-dimensional gradient on a large-ish image (1024x1024 or so). It will show clear evidence of banding at 8 bits per channel, since there are only 256 color levels available.

This will be substantially reduced if everything were properly dithered, but in normal software and normal displays it is not.

How worth it is I don't know, but there is absolutely an easily detectable difference. How about testing your hypothesis before claiming you know what you're talking about, hmm? It's not exactly a difficult experiment to carry out.

Re:To what end?

[im_thatoneguy]

Dead wrong.

Load Gimp, Photoshop or any other program.

Grab the gradient tool.

Select the colors [0,0,0] and [10,10,10]. Now create canvas as wide as your screen and create a gradient.

It'll look like you have 10 giant blocks. Now it still faces the same problem of delivering to 24 bpp displays for DVD but most LCDs have problem with even displaying 24bpp correctly. 30 will be headroom to ensure that at the very least the 24bpp will be rendered correctly.

Also the film and VFX company LARGELY works in 36-48bpp (12-16bit) and is moving to 96bpp (32bit) for all VFX.

There isn't a high end digital cinema camera that shoots below 10 bit (30bpp) log (12 bit linear (36bpp)) at this point. Film is almost exclusively scanned at 12-16bit color.

The only reason gradients even ever look ok on your display is because it's almost always dithered (noised) to compensate.

If you're going back out to film or a modern cinema projector you are also not going to be 'printing' to 8bit color.

Re:To what end?

[AbRASiON]

Is it possible, IS IT POSSIBLE?
You're actually asking is it possible, really?

This whole damned video display industry, from TV to computers to god knows what has gone 20 years backwards in display quality, ever since the LCD 'won' and the average consumer decided they preferred convenience and desk space over picture quality.

At the slow rate we're going at now, we might just have black levels and the colour reproduction of a basic, cheap CRT in about 5 years, maybe in 10 years time we might finally have a flat panel on my desk which is as good as the CRT's which have been replaced.

I've owned 4 different panels, I must've used 50 or more and none of them even come close to the quality of a CRT.
Just last night while cooking my kitchen (overlooks my lounge) I had my TV and laptop displaying the same movie (so I can watch while I cook) the colour difference is nothing short of astounding, the black level difference is horrible.

Crisp text, yes I know, I know and flicker - don't try that one, a good CRT doesn't flicker (120hz, 100hz etc)
I've accepted the sacrifice of an LCD on my computer desk and my laptop, well there's no choice but my loungeroom television, as much as I am tired of such a small one (36") and lack of crispness - I can not allow a plasma or LCD in my lounge - I can't do it to myself as I'll always be noticing the flaws.

Re:To what end?

[The Master Control P]

If you want a good CRT, you can buy a GDM-W900 or W900F on ebay or craigslist - they're absolutely professional grade displays and the image is a wonder to behold. I've plugged my laptop in to the mine's second input before; The difference in color saturation is stunning.

Unfortunately, we all have the same problem regadless of our monitor technology. It can either have black be truly black and get it's full dynamic range, or we can work in a room with a normal level of illumination.

Re:To what end?

[slashdotwannabe]

My point is that 24 bpp ought to be enough for anyone. Reminds me of something Bill Gates never said about 640k being enough for anyone...

Re:To what end?

[Carewolf]

Increasing the bit-depth will not be enough. The human eye sees way more than 3 colors, most are mapped to a 3-color space in the brain but a couple stand out. So we need a color-space with more than RGB to get closer to human vision. Most important are visible infrared and visible ultraviolet. These are needed for low light vision and glow effects, and without them you will never be able to see what is going on in Doom 4. Also to fix low light the bit-space should be made logarithmic, you can't see the difference between (0,0,254) and (0,0,255), but the difference between (0,0,1) and (0,0,2) is significant.

Re:To what end?

[rrohbeck]

FWIW, some women have 4 different receptors. One of the receptor pigments is encoded on the X chromosome so women can have two different types. See the Wikipedia article as usual.

Re:To what end?

[Haeleth]

Flat panels today almost all suck at color reproduction. It's rare to even approach 24-bit color.

Actually, it's easy to get 24-bit colour: don't use a laptop, and don't use the cheapest type of panel. Everything else has genuine 24-bit colour, and there are plenty of people selling excellent 24-bit flat panels at surprisingly good prices -- even mass-market companies like Dell.

My laptop is, I believe, an 18-bit panel.

Yes, all laptops seem to use TN film displays. I believe the reason is more to do with power consumption than contrast ratios, though. For desktop monitors, it's still as much about price; most people, when they see that a certain manufacturer offers a 24" widescreen for $350 and another 24" widescreen for $700, are just going to say "wow, that $350 one's a bargain!", not "hmm, I wonder whether the cheaper one only has 6 bits per channel?"

If they can get the contrast ratio to something even halfway usable with 30-bit color, we'll see 24-bit color with enough contrast to be used in real-world environments.

24-bit panels already do have enough contrast to be used in real-world environments. Most of the major suppliers of professional monitors (Eizo, NEC, LaCie, etc) barely even bother selling CRTs any more.

Re:To what end?

[Fluffy the attack ki]

Fortunately, analog humans are fairly blind to minute color changes. Unfortunately, our system of digital video happily shows you everything wrong with it.

I think you just summed up the entire discussion.

Re:To what end?

[badspyro]

Some of us DO innovate in the area of corsetry, It has now become a fairly major fashion item recently with Madonna wearing Mr Perl corsets regularly in her videos and on tour, as well as people such as Dita Von Tease.

And shops like Fairy Gothmother in the UK are flourishing in making both off-the-rack and custom made corsets.

Oh, and we don't use whale bone any more, we use spring steel. See? innovation there.

Re:To what end?

[smallfries]

That's not true (that you don't see small floating point - I assume that you're correct about these guys). If you read some of the literature on tone mapping they use small floating point formats. The reason being that although the eye is good at picking out graduations in colour over small ranges, when it is over a larger range the smaller graduations are ignored. Ie you get the same degradation in precision for larger magnitudes that floating point exhibits.

The best working guesses for this behaviour are that the neurons that do the relevant processing on the optic nerve are the type that integrate exponents of signals, rather than the signals themselves. (It's been a while since I last watched a seminar on this so I can't remember the names of the two types of neurons).

Re:To what end?

[Anonymous Coward]

... unless the 24bit display was trading spacial (or temporal) resolution for color depth and employed a technology commonly referred to as "dithering". One may have to sustitute "slow-motion" for zooming in case temporal dithering is used.

Re:To what end?

[JamesP]

To see billions of colors at the same time one only needs LSD technology...

Re:To what end?

[lpq]

So the video makers won't have to use hacks to render a video? So -- as the original article said, the video designers can ensure that the color they assign to Shrek at the beginning of the film is the same color used throughout and isn't altered during the entire film by other objects needing green.

I can imagine that if you have a few objects that you'd like to reserve color palette for over a feature length movie, the number of colors available might be more of an issue than in one static picture. It's possible this could simplify some rendering algorithms possibly allowing some speedups or optimizations?

Re:To what end?

[Anonymous Coward]

16-bit PCM only "sounds gritty" if your recording levels were way off. That's the real reason for 24-bit recording, it means you can have plenty of headroom. Unless your mastering engineer is stupid or crazy, the 16-bit CD version ought to be fine, because the quiet passages though still relatively quiet, have all the information needed to sound fine at their correspondingly lower playback level.

If you're one of these people who, every time the orchestra plays a quiet passage, runs over to his "Hi Fi" system to give the volume knob a sharp turn clockwise then you're an idiot. Buy some pop music so you won't have to do so much running about, and spare us the moaning.

[ One of the giveaways that we're doing fine at 16-bit is the fact that you can hear pages turning, musicians coughing and so on in classical recordings. How much of that do you think the live audience could hear ? We already have /so much/ fidelity that the use of human performers is a limiting factor, all you're going to find down in those remaining bits is noise ]

When actual double blind tests have been run on commercial recordings, trimming the bottom 8 bits of a 24-bit recording makes no difference to an audience until you turn the levels up uncomfortably loud. The extra money you spent on your DVD Audio or Super Audio CD was purely feel good money, I hope the player looks really /nice/

Re:To what end?

[kesuki]

"when they see that a certain manufacturer offers a 24" widescreen for $350 and another 24" widescreen for $700"

What drives me nuts is that you can get a 40" display for about $1,000 eg: a HDTV... why would a person spend $750 for a 24" monitor, when for $250 more dollars they can get a monitor AND a next gen TV set all rolled into one? AFAIK all the HDTV sets are 24-bit color, and they're still a better value than a normal monitor.

Re:To what end?

[rubah]

The PNG website used to have up a huge 16 million color image (where did that get off to?) and I know I sure as hell can't tell the difference between colors in a row.

It's a beautiful image, and I think it shows off not only PNG's capabilities but also 16 million color's.
(and it does show off png very beautifully, 512x32768 pixels at 116kb.

Re:To what end?

[ceoyoyo]

I did find a couple references to 10-bit floating point in a few audio applications. I don't think it would work well with a monitor though. Liquid crystals don't have the dynamic range to suit an exponential representation.

Re:To what end?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well duh, you wouldn't be able to see banding even in a 4096 color image if each color occupied just one pixel.

Re:To what end?

[sjames]

Most monitors can't actually do 256 levels of each color.

Go to the gimp and fill a 1024x1024 canvis with any color. Now select a square in the middle. Change the paint color by one and fill the selected area. Go to select->none. Now, find your square.

Try your gradient test on a high-end monitor.

Re:To what end?

[sjames]

That doesn't even make sense! If I color something as #13f522, that's what it's going to be everywhere. 24 bit displays don't have a palette.

It seems that every few years someone comes up with > 24 bits/pixel technology and gushes about how it'll revolutionize something or another. Then it quietly fades awway because it doesn't actually make a visual difference.

Re:To what end?

[jlarocco]

So the video makers won't have to use hacks to render a video? So -- as the original article said, the video designers can ensure that the color they assign to Shrek at the beginning of the film is the same color used throughout and isn't altered during the entire film by other objects needing green.

I can imagine that if you have a few objects that you'd like to reserve color palette for over a feature length movie, the number of colors available might be more of an issue than in one static picture. It's possible this could simplify some rendering algorithms possibly allowing some speedups or optimizations?

Software and image formats already exist that can use 48 and 64 bit color, the only thing new here is that now the images will get scaled to 30 bit color instead of 24 bit when being displayed. It doesn't have anything to do with special algorithms or assigning different colors to different objects because that would already be possible with existing software.

Re:To what end?

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite undergrad physics professor told a story of a grad student he worked with, who was given one of the first experimental lens replacements. The new lens, unlike her old, biological water-based lens, transmitted a lot more ultraviolet light than before. Surprisingly she was able to see this "new" color, and said it appeared as a very intense violet.

I always shudder when I recall this story, since she apparently sunburned her retinas more than a few times and ended up wearing sunglasses all the time.

Re:To what end?

[lpq]

Ok, software formats already exist that can use 48 and 64-bit color -- but is this what studios like Dreamworks use to create their photo-realistic movies? I remembered that Hi-Def video takes ALOT of diskspace as it is, but if it was rendered in 48 or 64-bit color, when such couldn't be seen by viewers at a movie or on a HD-DVD, wouldn't it be a waste of money? Would film-makers "already" be operating at 2-2.5x the number of bits that would be usable in any final product? Or are they already making the film masters in preparation for the next gen HD? Would they use the extra space for color reproduction or would they be more likely to go with higher resolutions?

But more importantly, doesn't the use of 10-bits/color, or 1024 levels allow more "dynamic range" of brightness --
hasn't that been a problem more in LCD's vs. video? Lack of comparable dynamic range of digital to film is one of the major problems with digital photography today. Does video suffer, somehow less, from problems with dynamic range than still photography -- especially when the video may be created from 25-30+ still pictures/second?

If we move to displays with 1000:1 contrast, isn't 10-bits about what one needs to hold all the ranges of brightness
on such displays?

Maybe people who complain about not being able to see differences of 1024-levels of brightness are used to monitors with 250:1 or 500:1 contrast monitors (that probably have real levels lower than that in practice)? Have end-user LCD monitors had more than 1000:1 contrast levels before the past few years?

Re:To what end?

[Anonymous Coward]

16-bit PCM only "sounds gritty" if your recording levels were way off. Change your hearing aid batteries, jackass. The 16th bit never gets turned on until you're about to clip. Average audio is riding around 12 bits and trying to accurately reconstruct the sawtooth waveshape of a violin string with two or three bits makes it more of a square wave. Sounds like shit, actually. If you've never heard the difference between a regular CD and a DVD-Audio, you're audibly challenged. The DVD-Audio sounds like someone cleaned your ears out compared to the CD. I know because I used to master and check DVD-Audio disks. Nobody wanted to pay the extra money for the difference because the audiophile is dead.

Re:To what end?

[Anonymous Coward]

I fail to see why monitors should be restricted to additive colors. Wouldn't it be great to have hybrid displays that can use substractive colors as well? It's just a matter of chemistry. IIRC there are already displays that can be viewed with either backlight or ambient light, or both.

Re:To what end?

[Pseudonym]

You would be almost right if you meant packing more bits into the same space.

Computer displays have an upper limit on brightness. In the real world, you can always add more photons.

This makes a real difference to people doing film work. If you define "white" as the colour of a reference white piece of paper/card on a brightly-lit day, then film can be illuminated over 20 times more than that before it saturates. Most of the time you don't need all that headroom, but specular highlights on chrome or water can be much brighter than reference white.

I say you'd be "almost" right, because there's one place where you're wrong.

Just about everything in human perception is logarithmic. (That's why sound intensity is measured in decibels, a logarithmic scale. 10dB -> 20dB sounds like the same volume increase as 20dB -> 30dB, even though it's not a step increase in power.)

Similarly, doubling the number of photons reaching your eye is perceived as the same "step" in light intensity no matter where you are on the intensity scale. So while a few extra bits wouldn't make a perceptual difference near white, it does make a difference near black.

Re:To what end?

[Pseudonym]

If I color something as #13f522, that's what it's going to be everywhere.

Have you ever owned a colour printer? Have you ever tried to get the print colour to match what's on your screen?

People who work in publishing know this problem all too well. But when you have multiple output formats, such as DLP, celluloid, TV and print, the problem gets even worse. Pixar and DreamWorks have an entire department each whose job is to ensure that the colour on the computer screen is the same as the colour on all output media.

Re:To what end?

[sjames]

I am familiar with that particular problem, but more bits doesn't solve it. Calibration and color management do.

Re:To what end?

[Skippy_kangaroo]

the bit-space should be made logarithmic
It already is for all intents and purposes. See: Gamma.

Your problem is that you need to calibrate your monitor properly.

Re:To what end?

[darenw]

More bits _DO_ help! With color calibration massaging 8-bit values for any one of the R/G/B channels, with only 256 possible input value and 256 output values, assuming it's doing anything at all you'll be suffering a many-to-one map. Certain output values never occur. This does lead to visible contours in the color-calibrated image, perhaps appearing as faint alternating green/magenta or blue/gold bands. Fine examples of this can be seen in Cassini images officially released at http://ciclops.org/ - but i'm not telling which ones, happy hunting ;-) Some of the raw data is 12 bits/channel (we laugh at only 30 bits/pixel, ha! ha!) and much easier to work with for calibration, enhancements and such without getting artifacty. Working with this stuff everyday gives us a good understanding of the value of 4 extra bits - and certainly even just two extra bits would be welcome where we could get them.

I imagine that while this new display may not be visibly better to the average visual duffer, those contours you get after calibrating 8 bit/channel data could be a problem in a number of specialized situation. Most important, though, is mainting 30-bit deep data all the way through the system from camera/3DCG/whatever to the final display.

What if.... decades ago, whoever decided that a "byte" is 8 bits had chosen 12 instead, and all the engineers followed along?

Re:To what end?

[ArAgost]

Please, RTFS at least. It says "aimed at the video production, animation, and graphic arts industries.". Pros will see the difference, just like in a music production studio they won't be using 19.95$ Creative speakers.

Re:To what end?

[Nicolay77]

one even has two peaks Well that explains why we perceive violet as close to red.

Re:To what end?

[Pseudonym]

Some of the raw data is 12 bits/channel [...]

Generally speaking, Pixar and DreamWorks' "raw data" is something like 16 bits per channel in a linear space. After compositing, it's converted to a 10 bits per channel logarithmic space. ILM does one better: They store their images in a half-precision floating point format.

Re:To what end?

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize I am late to this party but:

Modern monitors use an additive method of color blending, while printers (by their very nature) must use subtractive blending.

Most modern monitors use birefringent electrically-induced twisting crystals ("LCD"), so this is not quite true. Something approaching visible white light (for instance, using a blackbody radiator at the appropriate high temperature (filament), excited gas (CCFL), or electron bandgap (LED)) behind a number of calls of which (depending on electrical stimulation) rotate the polarization of light passing through them, typically between 0 and 90 degrees. These are sandwiched between polarizing filters which absorb 90-degree-rotated light in a particular frequency band, and pass through other frequencies independent of rotation.

What emerges through the LCD-filter sandwich is light that has been rotated and filtered to the point where it is somewhere between extremely dim (effectively "black") and polarized light only slightly less dim than the original white backlighting. This usually is passed through a scattering filter that depolarizes the light, depending on the desired screen effect (matte, glossy, some applications like to keep the light in a given polarization, etc.).

This is a subtractive model, and is limited mainly by the maximum transmissivity of the sandwich, and the maximum luminosity of the original light source, in the whole visible light band, or at least in near-gaussian distributions centred approximately on the frequencies most people's cone cells are most responsive to.

In principle this type of display can reproduce any colour that a reflective/scattering/absorptive printing system can, given the same lighting conditions. In practice, the filters are not that good, pixel density is not that good, dead pixels are very common, and the twisting of the birefringent crystals is imprecisely controlled. Colour management practices help, but there are limits to what can be done.

Additive displays, such as CRTs, are becoming fairly rare. They have the primary advantage of offering much darker blacks than most subtractive displays, and usually produce much greater brightnesses because they do not rely upon polarization changes and filtering. (The combination results in greater contrast, obviously.) They also often respond faster than crystals can change orientation. However, the quantitative difference between additive display technology and LCD technology -- especially as measured by emissions spectroscopy ("colorimetry", if you prefer) has been narrowing for many years, and is already at the point where well maintained high end displays are fundamentally identical for static images. Image movement, manufacturing costs, failure modes, and maintenance costs are much more important real considerations among display technologies on the high end now.

Finally:

One color space isn't bigger than the other; they're simply different

With some work (i.e., software), all of these display models can fairly faithfully reproduce a variety of colour spaces with little visible problem. Commercial CMYK printing systems, however, are limited by the physicial properties of colour agents (inks and dyes) and their chemistries interact with each other and with that of paper in ways which cannot currently be reliably overcome. Orange colours, for example, are hard to get right in litho systems. Printed matter also has the cost advantage but reproduction disadvantage of not being adjustable to ambient lighting, whereas most displays -- in principle -- can adapt to many different environments.

In short, while there are some important considerations in reproducing specific colours along the additive/subtractive axis of display systems, there are much more important and visible issues with respect to colour reproduction given different systems of emission, transmission or reflection of light.

No exact price...

[faffod]

But from the article "The companies also revealed that the upcoming display, which will become available for purchase sometime this summer, will cost much less than todayâ(TM)s high-end studio-quality LCD displays". That does tell me that this is not going to be stratospheric. Which means that I can hope that in some time in the next couple of years this should be in the realm of the affordable.

Slashdot is a homo think-tank

[lennyhell]

No word on the size of the displays that will actually be delivered, or on the price. So no point in posting that shit. Is says nothing. 100% fact free. That's not news. CmdrTaco loves cock is also not news.

Re:Slashdot is a homo think-tank

[lennyhell]

Are you stupid or what? I always post as myself. I am myself. And I'm very insightful.

Oh no, not again

[50000BTU_barbecue]

We DON'T have common 24 bit LCD displays, OK? They're all mostly dithered 18 bits. This new technology, is it perchance six extra dithering bits on a real 24 bit display?

Re:Oh no, not again

[SlashWombat]

Most of the actual LCD display panels on the market are 8 bits per individual colour (Which comes to 24 bits per pixel), so I would have to disagree about your statement on dithering due to the panel only having 6 bits per colour. (Which comes to 18 bits per pixel) A couple of years ago, I spent ages looking at various panels while in the initial design phase of desiging a monitor for USA cop cars. Ended up using the same display as the play station portable, which definitely had 8 bits/colour for a true 24 BPP interface.

Since most source material for the display is based on MPEG/JPEG, nobody will perceive any difference in the colour gamut anyway. This is due to the quantisation that MPEG/JPEG (etc) uses as part of the compression process. I

Re:Oh no, not again

[50000BTU_barbecue]

I believe you are wrong and you will need to provide me with some links. Most LCD panels used for consumer LCD monitors are indeed only 6 bits per color, and are dithered in the time domain to get some sort of semblance of more colors. Why do you think one of the numbers used to sell LCDs is the response time? Who cares about a response time of 6 or 4 ms on a panel that displays only 60 pictures per second, ie every 17 ms? It's because that's what allows the dithering to happen. I happen to own one of the first and one of the few true 24 bpp LCD monitors, the SGI 1600. Of course now I can't find the one web page that showed you how to find out which kind of panel you have, but it used to be at http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/. It is no longer there. Anyways, those 300$ 24 inch LCDs? 6 bits per color, guaranteed.

Re:Oh no, not again

[moonbender]

Err. 24-bit displays aren't nearly as rare as you think. I'm sure they were, though, 10 years ago when that SGI display was still revolutionary...

Re:Oh no, not again

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Again, I think you are wrong. There was a big stir just a few months ago about Apple displays being 18 bit. I think most LCD panels sold for PCs are still 18 bit panels, which is why you'll find it incredibly hard to get a simple, blunt "24 bits per pixel" mentioned on the box, or the company's website. But you'll get a gigantic "2ms response" sticker on the box. At best, you'll get something like "16 million colors" which means 18 bit, and 16.7 million colors when it's a true 24 bpp display.

Again, read this.

As for the 1600, the trade-off you have for a true 24 bpp display is narrower viewing angle and slower response time, this is due to the physics of the crystals. Check out the National Semi page for lots of info on what exactly a liquid crystal is, what the different types are and how they're driven, and lots of amusing info on the guts of LCD panels.

But for the dithering, it's sort of like buying CDs with 16 bit samples, but CD players only having 12 bit DACs but it not being written anywhere. But then, if no one can tell, why choose 16 bits in the first place? This reminds me of the waning days of Minidisc when suddenly everyone here became a very critical, golden-eared audiophile and could tell the difference between a CD and MD, but the same people turn around to their 18 bit displays, can't tell the difference, and go on thinking they are 24 bits.

Life on this planet never ceases to amaze and befuddle me.

Re:Oh no, not again

[osu-neko]

And again, you're in the wrong. The reason why there was a big stir was because usually such monitors are 24 bits, so the 18 bit Apple displays were glaringly obvious to the millions of us using true 24 LCD displays on our desktop. Trust me -- it was *immediately* obvious to me that my MacBook's display was only 18 bits with dithering, rather than true 24-bits like my desktop LCD monitors.

Of course I'm generalizing from a small sample, but in my experience, true 24-bit LCD displays are common on the desktop. Of course, it should also be noted that every monitor I've ever used has cost in the US$400-$800 range, and I'm the one who determined what monitors we were buying at work last time we put in a big order. Nothing outside of a few laptops have 18-bit displays there. :)

Re:Oh no, not again

[Anonymous Coward]

Prove it. Give me the model numbers of your desktop monitors, find me the model number and manufacturer of the actual panel and show me where it says 24 bits. Did you check who makes the panel? Did you know HP sells the same panels as rock bottom Acer monitors for 200$ more? LOL.

Re:Oh no, not again

[taerogue]

Who cares about a response time of 6 or 4 ms on a panel that displays only 60 pictures per second, ie every 17 ms? I've seen this (or a similar) argument regarding response times before, and it just doesn't make sense. I get the impression you are saying that, for a panel displaying 60 frames per second, any response time better than 17 ms is overkill? If a panel has a response time of 17ms (let's call it a hypothetical response time that is the same for any transition), that means that it will have *just* completed the crystal's rotation to the proper color/luminance as the next frame gets displayed! If you have anything fast going on, the display will be nothing but ghost trails and/or inaccurate colors. The pixels would be spending their entire time playing 'catchup'; only beginning to display accurate color/luminance if the next frame to be displayed is identical. So if you're playing 30fps video on said 17ms/60fps response panel, half of the displayed time for each frame would show the crystals transitioning to their new value. So, no. Give me a 2-5 ms 24bit (or greater) panel with no artifacts visible to Overdrive (or whatever is needed to get those crystals in their proper place quickly).. please! -Ty

Re:Oh no, not again

[imsabbel]

Every IPS and PVA Display should be 24bit.

I know that 18bit got a bit of a renaissance because of those high-speed "gamer" displays, but any quality LCD should be 24 bit. My 2 here certainly are.

Of couse if you buy the cheapest available, you dont deserve better. Thats the same price-group that also had a plethora of quality problems in the CRT age.

Re:Oh no, not again

[Anonymous Coward]

My Dell D600 laptop had a 24-bit display. I noticed the difference immediately with my new machine. The big stir with Apple wouldn't have been nearly so serious if (actual) 24-bit displays were not a common feature in laptops.

Re:yet another dupe :(

[Ethan Allison]

Okay these stories are getting annoying (and I hate to imagine the mental state of whoever wrote this). Can't we have a string filter on these copy-and-paste troll stories?

Unfortunately

[OMGZombies]

our eyes are more like 21 bit/pixel

Re:Unfortunately

[Jugalator]

[citation needed]

Re:Unfortunately

[osu-neko]

It's a common myth. I've seen it repeated any number of times, even in print. I think it comes from the fact that that's approximately how many colors you can get out of a television signal, and thus the 21-bit/2million colors figure becomes the standard number used by people telling us how many colors we can see. It's how many colors we can see on TV. :)

You can tell when someone repeats the myth that they've never really worked in graphics.

Re:Unfortunately

[rs79]

" our eyes are more like 21 bit/pixel"

Thank you. Your eyes cannot distinguish more than 14 shades of any color and I really don't get why we need more than 24 bits per pixel. I'd have to see a screen in 30 bit that you can't replicate in 24 but to buy into this, but it sounds like nonsense to me.

Oblig

[AndGodSed]

Well, tech such as this will bring our holodeck dreams just that bit closer.

Also I can see where tech such as this can be implemented in the medical field, as a for-instance.

That's fine, but

[gnix.geo]

I'd rather have a billion one-color displays.

Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

A billion colors should be enough for anybody.

I'm not a mod right now, so I think...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll just say it out loud: I think I love you.

Obligatory...

[mshmgi]

64 colors ought to be enough for anybody.

Re:Obligatory...

[Yvan256]

Yeah, EGA power!

(I'm assuming you were talking palette, not simultaneous colors)

Higher gamut

[PhrostyMcByte]

I was hoping for something like ScRGB support. I've always wanted two things out of displays: higher DPI, and higher gamut. Does this deliver either?

Chris Chinnock, President of the research firm "Insight Media", is one of those who are skeptical about HP's claims. He says that while the 30-bit resolution will allow for better gradation between the color levels, the technology will not be able to increase the color gamut of a display.

Guess not. Oh well.

See clearly

[Waccoon]

Why didn't they go to 32 bit? That way you could see through the monitor, too.

Yes, but...

[Bradmont]

how am I supposed to see how good this display is if they don't show me a picture of it?

A billion color display?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple's been selling those for years.

How is this different than LCD TVs?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this different than high end LCD TVs that have had 10-bit per color (which is 30-bits per pixel) for over a year now? For example, the Sony W3000/XBR4/XBR5 series. Higher bit depth color spaces are also supported by Deep Color introduced in HDMI 1.3, so it's not like HP had to design a new interface either.

It's just a shame that..

[Anonymous Coward]

.. video codecs used in consumer video systems (even H.264/Blu-Ray) do not have such high color depth. So what's the point?

Also: Are they actually going to test the displays to make sure that all intensities are discrete? It seems to me that quality control would have to be phenomenal to actually ensure that there were a billion discrete colors represented accurately by each and every pixel.

Re:It's just a shame that..

[mccalli]

.. video codecs used in consumer video systems (even H.264/Blu-Ray) do not have such high color depth. So what's the point?

And of course, video codecs have been perfected now and will never, ever change or improve. You're right - we should all just pack up and go home, it's all been done.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:It's just a shame that..

[Animaether]

Heck, if anything, those codecs should focus on higher quality output first; higher compression be damned. I hate seeing the blocky artifacts from any non-lossless video compression. I don't mind that they're only 8bpc, video and film noise tends to kill any banding issues anyway.. until they don't anymore, I won't worry about 10bpc, 16bpc or even 32bpc video encoding.

However... this is in collaboration with DreamWorks. This isn't about your typical DVD or Blu-Ray disc. This is about displaying things like digital intermediate files - from film scans (often done at 10bpc) right through whatever bitdepth pipeline in use for the project (16bpc or 32bpc being common), to the filmprint which again is done at a higher bitdepth than 8bpc. Even digital cinema is ready for higher bitdepths and if you google around a bit, you'll find several proposals for how to handle it efficiently (sizes do increase quite a bit with bitdepth, whereas a film roll will always be the size of 1 (one) filmroll.. whether the image is exposed/etched from an 8bpc digital or a 32bpc digital)

This will trickle down to consumers as well, however - especially photographers who are muttering about quantization artifacts (banding) in subtle gradients like, oh, the sky when taken with a high quality camera (i.e. low sensor noise).. taking a RAW will deal with that on the camera end, but they still end up displaying it back on your 8bpc monitor at the moment (unless they already have a 10bpc display - as I said in another comment.. this is not new; see SGI )

Re:It's just a shame that..

[CryoPenguin]

.. video codecs used in consumer video systems (even H.264/Blu-Ray) do not have such high color depth. So what's the point?

There's nothing wrong with the codecs; H.264 supports up to 14bpc (42bpp). The consumer applications (Blu-Ray) just decided not to use that feature. And the decision must be due in part to the rarity of >24bpp displays.

Come back after you've turned off anti-aliasing.

[nobodyman]

Is it really possible to improve screens further, in a way that's visible to the naked eye?

I think so. As a quick example of why I think this, temporarily turn off anti-aliasing in your OS. The characters on the screen should look pretty crappy relative to a book or an illustration. So, I think we have a ways to go. I think the same is true for color depth, it's just hard to recognize it because we have gotten used to 8 bits/pixel.

Most new displays have a resolution of 96dpi, whereas low-end printers can easily pull off 300dpi. Same goes for color-depth. Black and White screen images at 8 bits/pixel simply cant match the range of black&white print & film.

When you think about it, techniques such as anti-aliasing are really just hacks to work around the limitations of today's monitors. If monitors could pull off 300dpi, you wouldn't need anti-aliasing.

Re:Great

[$random_var]

I know you're jesting, but our eyes are definitely capable of appreciating 30 bits, and many megapixels as well. Our eyes don't work like cameras; we're excellent at discriminating fine differences within the area we're looking at. We might not be able to tell #cc1111 from #cd1111 in isolation, but if they're right next to each other we can see that difference and more.

(On a similar note, in the center of our visual field, we can discriminate physical positions with much greater accuracy than the receptor density would lead one to believe, because our analog receptors are capable of discerning fine differences by working with their neighboring receptors. So anybody who says "X resolution is higher than humans can see" is talking out of his ass. You can tell when they know what they're talking about when they say something like "at this resolution, most humans will only be able to perceive a 1-pixel difference 60% of the time" or something which sounds a lot more like signal theory than somebody comparing one arbitrary number to another arbitrary number.)

I'd like to see a double-blind test...

[dpbsmith]

...in which people are shown the a series of images on two of these displays, side by side... with copies of each image in the series being presented on each display, one rendered with a full 30 bits and the other with rendering reduced to 24 bits... and with the 30-bit image being randomly assigned to the left or right.

I'd like to see whether people can actually identify the 30-bit image at a rate significantly greater than chance... or whether they're just doing it because they can.

Like the "Eight-transistor radios" that had non-functional transistors on the circuit board, just so that the manufacturers could claim to have more transistors than the competition. (Yes, companies really, really, really did this).

Re:I'd like to see a double-blind test...

[icegreentea]

Get a 1024 pixel high/wide image. And then make a perfect white-black gradient. You should be able to tell between the two. As someone else pointed out, you only have 256 greys, so you end up with one grey forming a 4 pixel band (which is noticeable). The new displace will have one grey per pixel.. much harder to tell.

Re:I'd like to see a double-blind test...

[evanbd]

If you dithered that gradient properly it would be much harder to tell. You've essentially created a signal with a period of 8 pixels and overlaid it on top of the smooth gradient as a result of the quantization errors. It's that signal that's easy to see. If you dithered it properly, the noise would be shaped so that it didn't show up at one specific frequency band (ie 8 pixels and its harmonics), it would be much less noticeable. Note that eg digital photography processes do this inherently to some degree in the analog sensor.

Of course, very little software will do that dithering properly for you, so it's kind of a moot point. But then, not much will make proper use of 10 bit per channel color, either. I'd love to see one of these things up close...

Re:I'd like to see a double-blind test...

[osu-neko]

I'd like to see whether people can actually identify the 30-bit image at a rate significantly greater than chance...

Viewing the whole image at once, indeed looking at the two side by side? Probably not. But ask me to sit down in front of each for 5 minutes and do some real work in the GIMP or Photoshop, and I guarentee you I'll be able to tell you which is which with 100% accuracy. 24-bits of color is not sufficient to exceed my ability to distinguish when I'm focused on the tiny details.

Re:I'd like to see a double-blind test...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easiest to see with green. Example.

Re:I'd like to see a double-blind test...

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the "Eight-transistor radios" that had non-functional transistors on the circuit board Radios today have a lot more than eight, plus stereo.
Have you noticed all that n-bit DAC stuff?

[/crotchety sarcasm]

Please type the word in this image: "miseries" (in your face grammer nazis!)
Logged-in users aren't forced to preview their comments. How humane.

Oops; edited...

[dpbsmith]

(I meant to say... yes, I used Preview but I didn't look at it...) ...in which people are shown a series of images on a matched pair of these displays, placed side by side... with copies of each image in the series being presented on each display, one rendered with a full 30 bits and the other with rendering reduced to 24 bits... and with the 30-bit image being randomly assigned to the left or right.

I'd like to see whether people can actually identify the 30-bit image at a rate significantly greater than chance... or whether HP is just using 30 bits because they can.

Like the "Eight-transistor radios" that had non-functional transistors on the circuit board, just so that the manufacturers could claim to have more transistors than the competition. (Yes, companies really, really, really did this).

Mod parent (or his sibling) up... however,...

[Animaether]

They're absolutely right that CMYK does not encompass RGB. They overlap for a large part, and don't overlap in small areas (with one larger area in the deep vivid cyans).

However, a larger bitdepth doesn't do anything for color space. It simply determines the granularity of that color space. If with 16 bit you get 65,536 individual colors within the RGB gamut (with slightly higher granularity in the green channel, typically), and with 24bit you get 16,777,216 individual possible colors within the RGB gamut, then with 30 bit (10 bit per channel; it's not new, really), you get 1,073,741,824 individual possible colors... but still within the RGB gamut (of the device at hand).

An HDR display (either by using a very bright backlight or more localized LED backlights control, etc.) also doesn't change the gamut of that device - it simply allows for much brighter values of them.

Now, if they were to make an LCD panel that aside from the R,G,B pixel elements also had C M Y pixel elements, then you most certainly could increase the gamut. It would also be much more difficult to switch to than a simple bitdepth change.

Re:Mod parent (or his sibling) up... however,...

[Anonymous Coward]

You corrected half of his post, but you got half of yours wrong.

Adding CMY to additive RGB would do nothing to very little (depending on exactly which hues you use). To get more colors, you want to add primaries as far as possible from the convex hull of RGB, such as spectral violet which is direly missing.

Interestingly, you don't need 4 or more numbers to represent such colors, you just need to extend the RGB triple to negative values and to values greater than 1. But seeing the level here, those considerations are probably too advanced.

Re:Mod parent (or his sibling) up... however,...

[moosesocks]

Now, if they were to make an LCD panel that aside from the R,G,B pixel elements also had C M Y pixel elements, then you most certainly could increase the gamut. It would also be much more difficult to switch to than a simple bitdepth change. That would make no sense on an LCD display, given that CMY is a subtractive color model, whilst color is achieved on LCDs via additive blending.

Although adding another "primary" color should increase your gamut, CMY might not be the best choice of colors to use in that case.

Think of RGB mixing is analogous to shining three different-colored flashlights at a white target, the complete overlap of which should also be white.

CMY color mixing is analogous to taking three different colored sheets of glass, and layering them on top of each other. A complete overlap should be completely black).

To implement subtractive color mixing, we'd first need a revolutionary change in display technology. By their very nature, LCDs are incapable of subtractive blending.

Re:Mod parent (or his sibling) up... however,...

[cheater512]

With OLED displays, adding more colours should become a lot easier.

Re:Mod parent (or his sibling) up... however,...

[blincoln]

However, a larger bitdepth doesn't do anything for color space.

Actually, it does.

A higher bit depth means that the maximum contrast between channels is greater, *because* you have more resolution (or granularity, if you like) in each channel.

For a very obvious example of this, take a 24-bit RGB colour image and downconvert it to 16-bit. The difference between 8 bits per channel and 5 (or 6 for green, depending on the type of 16-bit encoding) is quite dramatic. It's why older 3D games tend to look washed out by comparison to newer ones.

Re:Mod parent (or his sibling) up... however,...

[toddestan]

I would think it would be easiest with LCDs, since all you would need to change is the dye/filter layer that goes over the pixels. Probably would work best with CCFL backlights, since they have a fuller spectrum.

Re:Mod parent (or his sibling) up... however,...

[Anonymous Coward]

The real limit on how much color a display or a piece of paper is quite limited to the mediums themselves. Since we are still limited by three specific wavelengths that we use to define and reproduce color and light, Red, Green, Blue.

Quite simple really, we have three different types of cones in our retinas that handily pick up those same spectra. Unless you are color-blind or tetrachromatic.

Nature however isn't limited to these three different wavelengths displaying greater diversity than we have been able to represent, and until displays evolve enough to represent additional wavelengths, or even variable wavelenghts in a gamut, progress in higher bytelength or granularity is pointless.

You can only go so far with HDR in affecting the Luminance and Intensity of a color, but it is still limited by the definition of the three basic wavelengths.

Printers and painters have gotten around this problem for years by using different dyes from different sources. They haven't been as limited to CMYK as that is only what defines what a computer can currently represent.

I could go on and tie all of this in with other limits that we have restrained ourselves with, like the 12et scale which ignores harmonics completely...but

ooh shiny!!

Re:Mod parent (or his sibling) up... however,...

[Anonymous Coward]

While adding C, M or Y elements to a screen is one way to increase its gamut, one can also achieve a wider gamut with "purer" RGB base colors, e.g with LED backlights.Some of the "wide gamut" displays available today employ this, others just use the a normal flourescent backlight and specially tuned filters. I'm quite certain that 4-color LCDs with additional cyan subpixels were anounced 1-2 years ago, but I don't know if any actual products have ever been delivered.

Re:Mod parent (or his sibling) up... however,...

[blincoln]

Hello, ignorant user who modded me "overrated". Maybe you should research the topic before you assume I'm incorrect.

Higher bit depth increases the maximum difference in value between channels. This is simple math. This increases the colour space because it means that the brightest value for each channel can be set higher on the display system without making *everything* appear too bright/saturated.

Think of it this way - if I have only four bits per channel, then I only get 16 steps in between black and fully (red/green/blue). If I turn the brightness on my monitor up really high, then I can get bright colours, but *only* bright colours, because 1/16th of "really bright" is still "pretty bright". If I turn down the monitor brightness, then I can only get dim colours for the same reason.

Increased bit depth is good for gradients and reducing banding, but it also increases the colour space. Again, compare a 16-bit texture with a 24-bit texture.

Re:Mod parent (or his sibling) up... however,...

[Anonymous Coward]

To implement subtractive color mixing, we'd first need a revolutionary change in display technology.

You know, there are subtractive displays. It's called e-paper.

Re:Mod parent (or his sibling) up... however,...

[ArAgost]

They're absolutely right that CMYK does not encompass RGB. They overlap for a large part, and don't overlap in small areas (with one larger area in the deep vivid cyans). CMYK and RGB are color models. It's specific (device-dependent) color spaces that may overlap.

Re:Mod parent (or his sibling) up... however,...

[Ed Avis]

Umm... by your argument, if you went down to one bit per channel then the display would either be unreadably dark or totally washed-out. Yet many computers had one-bit-per-channel displays and somehow still managed to display dark black, bright white, bright red and so on.

If there are only 16 steps in between black and fully red, then there are 16 steps. It doesn't mean that black cannot be just as black, or that fully red cannot be just as red. There are just fewer steps in between the two extremes.

8 minute abs

[goombah99]

It take HP 30 bits to show color? Ha! my old Apple II could do it in just 8 bits. HP has a lot of catching up to do.

Re:8 minute abs

[Threni]

> It take HP 30 bits to show color? Ha! my old Apple II could do it in just 8 bits. HP has a lot of catching up to do.

At the expense of lower case characters, yes. Still, you had Epoch to make up for it.

Re:8 minute abs

[SnowZero]

No, it's a kdawson article; Based on the summary excerpt:

HP promises blacker blacks and whiter whites the title should read:

HP promotes racism and ethnic cleansing to create racial purity.

Re:8 minute abs

[toddestan]

It take HP 30 bits to show color? Ha! my old Apple II could do it in just 8 bits. HP has a lot of catching up to do.

I'm not impressed. My old IBM could do color with just 4 bits.

Re:Come back after you've turned off anti-aliasing

[Animaether]

Displays can already do a much higher DPI - some handhelds with 3" screens can do 800x600. That's 2.4" along the length, for 800dots/2.4" = 333.33333etc. DPI.

However, imagine a full size 17" widescreen (16:10) at a DPI of 300. 17" is about 14.4" wide by 9" high. 14.4*300 = 4320, 9*300 = 2700. A 4320x2700 display? Crikey. I'm sure we'll get there eventually, but at the resolution rate we're currently seeing - not for some time aside from high end displays.

tsk

[nih]

two colours should be enough for anyone!

Re:yet another dupe :(

[somersault]

Can just change your threshold for comments to browse at 0 or above. Personally I browse at -1, but just stop reading when I recognise the sentence (that "let yOUR conscient be yOUR guide!" guy is annoying too :P )

The billion colors is for porn

[gooseupfront]

Finally, I'll be able to make out all of the highlights in my favorite pr0n stars hair!

RGB does not span the colorspace of the eye anyway

[viking80]

Normal RGB displays do not span the colorspace the eye can see. Just like good printer need more than 3 color ink to make good photograps, good display need more than Red, Green and Blue dots to span the whole colorspace of the eye. No matter how many bits you put behind each color, you can not improve this fact.

Brief explanation:
RGB colors are designed to match the human eyes sensitivity for the three primary colors. Each color cones spectral sensitivity partly overlaps the others. The RGB display therefore can not excite the Blue cone exclusively nor the Red cone. A new display with the following colors could get close:
Violet@400nm, Blue@430nm, Green@530nm, Orange@650nm and DeepRed@700nm

Quantum displays

[sveard]

Besides reqular light, I want my screen to radiate X-rays, Gamma-rays and infrared light, and also ordinary radio waves and even more kinds of waves.
I want it to emit quarks, neutrons and positrons, and perhaps god particles.
The constrast of todays screens is appalling, I want miniature black holes creating perfect black tones. I wouldn't know how to create perfect white tones though.

Yes, I am serious!

Re:Quantum displays

[ceoyoyo]

You can get a few of those if you just find a really old CRT. The ones that inspired your mother to warn you not to sit too close to the TV.

Good and bad

[Anonymous Coward]

This is good and bad. They want to improve things. That's good. It isn't TrueColor(tm) 48 bit display. That's bad. Its 30 bits (6 more bits than the 24 we have now), and that's good. (I already mentioned 16 bits per color instead of 10). This will do nothing to alter the color gamut (unless they start producing back lighting in the monitors that delivers color frequencies not currently delivered by the fluorescent bulb now lighting displays. That's bad. If they put a full spectrum or true spectrum light source (better yet, one that you could calibrate to increase/decrease color frequencies and also adjust the color temperature) that would be very good. I didn't read anything in the article about that. That's bad.

The problem with this...

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a large vfx studio in West LA.

The problem with displays like this, is that it looks good when you do your DI/Color timing, but that gets shot to hell when it gets reproduced and shipped to theaters. I've seen our work look absolutely gorgeous on our digital projection system, only to see in the theater with the colors desaturated and the blacks crushed out. Maybe digital projection will solve that issue. I don't know.

For a place like dreamworks its a neat tool, where the end client is the producer of the imagery. But for most of us, we're shipping our footage to the studio and hopefully their DI/Color people don't mess things up. The final look and color is out of our hands.

Just take a look at a few of the big summer release trailers out there, really bad colors/compositing/etc. Yes, trailer footage is often work in progress shots, yes the monkeys in the internet marketing departments crush and saturate the hell out of online movie trailers, but jesus, some clients are shameless in showing bad work.

Most of this great technology is going to wind up on some asshole producers desk, unused and collecting dust.

Oh well, the best I can hope for is waiting for the bleeding edge to slowly make its way into mass produced equipment.

Re:Great

[ceoyoyo]

The way you test resolving ability is to get the optical device (eye or camera) to resolve something. The simplest test is to determine whether two dots are separate or not. Your optometrist does something similar every time she asks you to read the eye chart.

You can certainly determine the resolving power of a normal eye. No matter what the sensor is doing, the resolving power is fundamentally limited by the lens in front of it. You need two numbers though: separation (dots per inch) and distance to the image.

Re:RGB does not span the colorspace of the eye any

[Mprx]

The receptor spectral overlap is one reason why the ultimate visual interface can only be direct neural connection. Anyone who's tried psychedelic drugs will have seen colors that don't exist in reality, generated directly in the brain bypassing the eyes. I also suspect the human brain will adapt well to at least five channels of color, given the existence of tetrachromat humans, and even higher dimension color space perceiving animals. Humans only see a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, but most never consider it might be possible to improve this. I want my cybereyes.

for extremely large values of 3

[Speare]

HP promises blacker blacks and whiter whites -- though TFoT quotes one source who notes that if they deliver this, it will be due to the back-lighting and not to the number of bits/pixel.

Wow, the definition of dynamic range isn't based on the number of bits per pixel? Whodathunk? Then it must also be true that using a double variable instead of a float does not in fact make 3.0000000000000 > pi.

Re:Great

[icegreentea]

I think the grandparent was talking about color resolution not angular/optical (or is it something else?) resolution. There is no arguing that human eyes are fundamentally limited by our lenses, and that gives us a pretty much fixed benchmark for maximal human sight in one measure. But when it comes to distinguishing colors, human vision is far less concrete. The fact that we have an auto adjusting white balance should be enough proof of that.

This thing's a ripoff

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw a screenshot of the thing and it looks the same as my monitor!

TuringTest for monitors...

[TropicalCoder]

I propose a Turing Test for monitors. Have a monitor, and a window opening onto some chosen view, side by side. Through the window one could view a street with cars and people passing by, while on the monitor is a real time video of exactly the same scene. To be fair, maybe the person judging would have his head secured in some kind of harness to prevent head movement. It would be interesting to see when a monitor would pass such a test, where the majority of viewers couldn't tell the difference. Any predictions?

Of course it is just as much a test of the camera as it is of the monitor - a test of the entire system. Something that hasn't been mention much in the discussion of these hi bit depth monitors - are the cameras capable of delivering the greater pixel depth?

It depends, but in this case about 720.

[Malekin]

Human brightness sensitivity is not even close to constant across the total range of brightness we can perceive. It varies widely over the range of colours we can see, and from person to person. Scene composition affects it, too: the shape of an object in relation to nearby objects changes our perception of its brightness. You have to consider lateral inhibition, limited integration capability, the optical modulation function of the eye, and orientation and temporal filtering, not to mention the various forms of noise that affect all parts of the vision system. The human vision system is not a camera and trying to model it as one is extremely naÃve.

With all that warning out of the way, the greyscale Just Noticeable Difference for a monitor of about 600cd/m^2 is equivalent to 720 steps.

For a 1024 steps, the monitor would need a peak intensity of around 4000 cd/m^2 to match the greyscale step increase with the statistically average human just noticeable difference.

Re:It depends, but in this case about 720.

[pablomme]

Interesting. Is the relative sensitivity (in ideal conditions, ignoring the details you mention above) anything close to logarithmic w.r.t. brightness? In such case it would be ideal to use floating-point numbers for pixel intensities, rather than integer steps. Pretty much, in many senses, like 32-bit floating-point audio.

Re:It depends, but in this case about 720.

[Malekin]

http://medical.nema.org/dicom/final/sup28_ft.pdf

Re:yet another dupe :(

[osu-neko]

I am so happy that I have no idea what you're talking about. :)

Re:Great

[Kjella]

I know you're jesting, but our eyes are definitely capable of appreciating 30 bits, and many megapixels as well. (...) We might not be able to tell #cc1111 from #cd1111 in isolation, but if they're right next to each other we can see that difference and more. I wish I had a picture someone posted to once, it was something like blue text on a blue background with varying difference. Most that tried, myself included, couldn't detected anything less than 3 color codes apart (say #0000fc - #0000ff). That was on a perfectly still image right next to each other, you knew what you were looking for and I was staring very intensely to try to make out the outline. 30 bits/pixel? You'll pick out one in 2^22 = 4M+ nuances of #0000ff? Hahahahaha. I'll bet a million dollars against you and anyone that modded that informative that you can't do it.

On a similar note, in the center of our visual field, we can discriminate physical positions with much greater accuracy than the receptor density would lead one to believe, because our analog receptors are capable of discerning fine differences by working with their neighboring receptors. So anybody who says "X resolution is higher than humans can see" is talking out of his ass. Who the hell tries to measure sight by receptor density? We measure it using charts, which given the billions of samples we've done tell us that even the most exceptional don't do better than 20/8 vision, which means that you can reliably distinguish objects separated by an angle of 0.4 arc minutes at 20 feet. From there it's pure math depending on how much of your field of view you want it to cover, so I guess you're the one talking out of your ass. Unless you think the acuity charts are wrong and that we actually see completely differently, in which case I'd get a good psychotherapist.

Re:Great

[Malekin]

You need two numbers though: separation (dots per inch) and distance to the image. You only need one number: angular resolution. 300dpi at 1m (which is about the accepted upper limit) is about 17 arcseconds, if I got my math right.

It's naÃve to treat the human vision system like a camera. The two things are very different.

dynamic range?

[rakslice]

"HP promises blacker blacks and whiter whites - though TFoT quotes one source who notes that if they deliver this, it will be due to the back-lighting and not to the number of bits/pixel."

Don't monitors use linear DACs? And doesn't this mean more or less linear light level scales? (I'll admit that I don't know much about how LCDs operate.)

Re:Come back after you've turned off anti-aliasing

[Jeff DeMaagd]

There are different forms of antialiasing. The ClearType used by Windows really gets me. Yes, it does make the shapes smother, but what it does is turn the edges into rainbows. Instead of the right edge of a shape being a consistent color, and the left edge of a shape being a consistent color, it could be any of three colors anywhere. But it is the sharpest form of antialiasing for text.

Waste Of Money

[DynaSoar]

The human eye can discern around 4.5 million colors. Anything more than that requires instrumentation to detect. You can use it to prove you have a monitor capable of a billion colors, but you'll never see them.

Re:Waste Of Money

[dreamchaser]

Nobody really knows exactly how many colors we can see. The estimates range from around 4 million to over 10 million, and it appears to vary widely between different people.

I do tend to agree that billions of colors is a waste though.

Re:Waste Of Money

[DynaSoar]

> Nobody really knows exactly how many colors we can see. The estimates range from
> around 4 million to over 10 million, and it appears to vary widely between
> different people.

Quite so. There are a few tetrachromats (4 different color receptors) who can presumably see one third more than us trichromats, and even we might see more than the oft quoted 4.5 million.

> I do tend to agree that billions of colors is a waste though.

Even the present 24 bit/16.7 million SVGA-level output out performs the most sensitive human visual system, including tetrachromats. Ducks, as quintachromats, *might* be able to see the full 16.7M. If so, they're not saying.

Great Jorb.

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, when I have eyes which are capable of distinguishing that many colours, I'll be sure to buy one of these.

Re:Come back after you've turned off anti-aliasing

[phasm42]

The ClearType used by Windows really gets me. Yes, it does make the shapes smother, but what it does is turn the edges into rainbows.

This may be due to your monitor not being specified correctly. IIRC, there are two main types of LCD panels: RGB and BGR (different color orders), and in order for ClearType to work correctly, it has to know which one you're using. I've noticed if someone does a non-lossy screen capture of some ClearType text on a computer set up for the opposite sub-pixel color order than what I use, the text looks crappy and has that rainbow effect.

I've seen this before

[Trevin]

"High Dynamic Range display technology" was presented at SIGGRAPH 2004 by Sunnybrook Technologies. If I remember correctly, they used 16 bits of luminance as opposed to the usual 8 per color, and the display combined traditional LCD pixels with LED backing light, which is just what TFA states the HP monitors are now using. Not only did it give a very high contrast ratio (40000:1), but the images it displayed were absolutely stunning to see -- it's the difference between reflected light and transmitted light.

Imagine seeing a rendering of the inside of a cathedral, where the windows look as if there is actual sunlight shining through them. Or an oudtoor scene where the clouds have a silver lining that's considerably brighter than the rest of the scene. It's hard to describe.

Re:I've seen this before

[eggnoglatte]

Well, Sunnybrook later renamed itself "Brightside Technologies", and was acquired by Dolby last year.

http://www.dolby.com/promo/hdr/

Could be that we are seeing the first commercial product spun out of Dolby's licensing efforts.

Re:Great

[$random_var]

I wish I had a picture someone posted to once, it was something like blue text on a blue background with varying difference. Most that tried, myself included, couldn't detected anything less than 3 color codes apart (say #0000fc - #0000ff). That was on a perfectly still image right next to each other, you knew what you were looking for and I was staring very intensely to try to make out the outline. That says more about the quality of the typical consumer-grade monitor than our ability to distinguish 24 (or 30) bits. Cheap monitors have compressed color gamuts and very much non-linear responses to the color codes it receives, so a difference of 3 can easily be compressed down into a difference too small to see. I did a little experiment just now: I have two LCD monitors with VGA inputs, one of which has to receive its signal through a DVI-VGA converter. Under the current settings I have, varying the color red, I can distinguish a difference of 2 on one monitor, and 5 on the one going through the converter. Messing with the color temperature settings I can reduce that to 1 and 3. However, there is such a thing as a medical-grade colored light, you stick your head under a hood and a precisely calibrated color fills the box. When I was a kid my uncle brought one home and used it with us once, so I forget their medical purpose, but one of the tasks is just to ask the person to report when the color changes. Many people can detect the minimum color change the machine can supply, although it depends on a lot of variables including the person's mood and where in the color space the starting point is.

Who the hell tries to measure sight by receptor density? We measure it using charts, which given the billions of samples we've done tell us that even the most exceptional don't do better than 20/8 vision, which means that you can reliably distinguish objects separated by an angle of 0.4 arc minutes at 20 feet. I wouldn't say acuity charts are "wrong", but they may not be useful, because "acuity" depends on the task we're being asked to perform. Once again, our eyes aren't like cameras. Determining how well somebody performs on a Snellen eye chart will tell you some information about how high somebody's acuity is, but it will mostly tell you about how that person performs on a Snellen eye chart. It's more useful to find people's "contrast sensitivity function" and how that varies under various kinds of motion. In particular, we like to know how their csf varies with dilation/contraction because that is the central driving problem, but it's very difficult to find that as spatial frequency also varies with dilation/contraction. Even that will only tell you so much, though. Our acuity depends very strongly on the task we're being asked to perform.

If a high-resolution display was filled with two black rectangles separated by a 1-pixel-tall horizontal white line, with the top rectangle moving up and down and occasionally blocking the white line, at what resolution would we cease to be able to perceive that white line? It would have to be a ridiculously high resolution, and it would also depend on the contrast ratio of the display. "Acuity" will always depend on the task, and there are many tasks beyond the one described which can benefit from higher resolutions.

did you see the screenshot?

[Anonymous Coward]

wow!! 30 bits looks fantastic!

Couple of things

[Sycraft-fu]

The first is to improve grey scale. Your eyes are extremely sensitive to changes in luminescence. As such we can see grey scale gradients with great precision. 256 levels (which is what 8 bits per channel gets you) just isn't enough. There are already grayscale medical displays out that do 1024 greys (10-bit).

Then of course there's the problem of wider gamut and wider dynamic range displays. Right now most displays show a fairly small subset of the total amount of colours humans can perceive, and also have a fairly narrow contrast range. Well, we'd like to increase that and I'm sure will succeed with newer technology (there has already been some success, I'm typing this on a wide gamut LCD). The only problem is that the more range a display has to cover, the larger and thus more noticeable in individual step is.

As an analogy say we were trying to measure distance. We have a 1 metre range and we measure it using 8 bits of precision. Ok, no problem, this gives us sub millimetre resolution. However now say we expand that range to 100 metres. Well now our resolution went to shit, it is only slightly better than half a metre. If we want to get back down to the millimetre range, we need more steps, more bits of precision.

Same thing as displays improve the range of colours they can display. The individual steps between colours will get larger and more noticeable unless we add more steps.

side bar topic:

[circletimessquare]

while a billion colors is obviously ridiculous, there are people who can see 100x more colors than an average person

scientists have recently identified a very small, very rare population of women who see in 4 colors, to a total of 100 million colors

most humans see in 3 colors, about 1 million colors: red, green, and blue. a tetrachromat has an extra cone type between red and green, around orange. it's only women because the mutation requires two x chromosomes to work

read all about it, they describe a women who can look into a river and make out silting and depth levels a normal human can't, x-men mutant indeed!:

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06256/721190-114.stm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy

Re:side bar topic:

[BiggerIsBetter]

You know, if I could have my kids genes tweaked, tetrachromacity is one of the mods I'd opt for.

Whiter whites! NOW with UV-dye!

[Anonymous Coward]

HP promises blacker blacks and whiter whites â" though TFoT quotes one source who notes that if they deliver this, it will be due to the back-lighting and not to the number of bits/pixel.

Not quite... I mean that's totally technically accurate, but I mean, one way to look at increased bits is an increased resolution within the existing range; or, if you were to tweak the range with the bits/pixel, you could end up with a display where the resolution (lumens / bit ???) is the same - but the range is expanded.

I'm not saying that that's technically the same thing as increasing bits/pixel... but that maybe some HP pres got some techie to "explain it in simple terms for me" and got to the point in the conversation where he wrote down "what is the consumer benefit of bits/pixel", glazed over for thirty minutes while the techies ramble on, then snatches onto the one phrase "it would even allow us to have the same color vibrancy as current models, but the overall white and black levels would be expanded beyond the current range" or whatever they said - recognized that as a marketable feature, slapped some PR wording on it, and threw it out there...

Just one possible scenario. At least in this one, HP isn't intentionally being technically dense, right?

BTW, the subject line is a reference to what laundry detergent manufacturers do to make your whites whiter - they add a UV dye to them to make them literally glow in sunlight!

more bits = whiter whites and blacker blacks

[jaekwon]

the abstract posted here is misleading. more bits in describing color (with the same gamma curve) will actually give you more contrast between the brightest and the darkest colors. the article quotes that the *saturation* and *vibrancy* are directly related to the backlight, not the blacker blacks and whiter whites. you can have super white/black ratio but still have no vibrancy/saturation.

you won't really notice the difference between two very similar colors in today's displays even if they were put side by side. but with the new HP displays you will appreciate how lighting and shadows are presented.

I may be wrong....

[longbot]

But hasn't 32bpp been a standard color depth for quite some time now? Hell, by very first "powerful" graphics card (ATI Rage series with a whopping 4MB of RAM on it) had an option for 32 bit color depth up to 1024*768, as I recall. So, why exactly is 30-bit depth news?

Re:I may be wrong....

[Wordplay]

Because current-tech LCDs don't display that full range.

Re:I may be wrong....

[Wordplay]

Gah. I blew it in my prior response.

32 bit in graphics card terms is 8 bits per colored pixel plus an 8-bit alpha channel for transparency. Only 24 bits are used for colors, and our displays have been 24 bit displays.

This uses 30 bits for colors.

Re:I may be wrong....

[longbot]

So, LCDs are still playing catch-up to CRTs in this area. I see now.

Re:Great

[ceoyoyo]

The grandparent started off on colour then took a left turn into resolution. That seems to be a common occurrence in this discussion.

Colour IS much less concrete. If you put an 8 bit gradient up on the screen you can see the differences in colours side by side. Can you see that in an actual image? Very rarely.

Re:Great

[ceoyoyo]

Okay, true. You need two numbers if one of them is the number of dots in the image, which it almost always is when talking about tech.

helping CB

[godrik]

Oh, this will surely help color-blind peoples!

useless over DVI

[mindesign]

DVI limited to 8 bits per channel. anyone know if the "DeepColor" HDMI supports what they purport to display? also, gonna need *another* NVidia card; they support a 10-bit DAC and i think some wacky dual-link mode that nobody supports properly, but i sure wish it was 12-bits like the 10+ year old SGIs...

Re:useless over DVI

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha. Using digital bits to communicate color to your display is so '80s. My analog VGA monitor can display eleventy-gajillion colors or something. I guess I'd have to count the number of individual electrons making contact with the phosphor to pinpoint the real number.

Of course it has whiter whites...

[Wordplay]

It goes to 111111111111111111111111111111.

Oblig. bash quote

[phozz bare]

#495173 +(1653)- [X]
<microgal> and whiter than white
<RobinHood> heh
<Kronovohr> so...you're like #GGGGGG?

Are you sure?

[pinkfloydhomer]

Have you actually made an honest and serious attempt to tell the difference between a mid price-range audio system and a bleeding edge $50,000 system?

Great! Until HP service swaps it for inferior part

[chriscoolc]

Just don't send it in to HP for repair, unless you want to risk having them replace it with an inferior part. They pulled that switch on me last summer when I sent in my HP notebook on warranty (sent it back with a crappy low-res screen instead of the original one). 5 months later of dealing with their worthless, lying, evasive case managers, I gave up because it just wasn't worth the utter frustration. In total, on a 14 month old machine, they had it for 6 freaking months.

Apple innovation

[wdebruij]

Black is the new grey.

Lines are already forming at Apple stores worldwide
for the revolutionary black operating system
(which will ofcourse cost more than MacOS, the white edition).

Steve Jobs's wardrobe all make sense now. He had it
all planned from the start. He must be the one.

Another Con?

[Whiteox]

lol I can see it now....
2011: New apps and games only come in 30 bit. So now we need to upgrade from 24 bit to 30 bit.
The die-hard 24 bit-ters are holding out with their defunct copies of XP and DirectX9. Even Ubuntu's Zulu Zygote now has full 30 bit support.....

Hey! There was nothing wrong with VGA was there?
I mean Dukem Nukem v 1.0 was playable.....

Re:Come back after you've turned off anti-aliasing

[cnettel]

The ClearType used by Windows really gets me. Yes, it does make the shapes smother, but what it does is turn the edges into rainbows.

This may be due to your monitor not being specified correctly. IIRC, there are two main types of LCD panels: RGB and BGR (different color orders), and in order for ClearType to work correctly, it has to know which one you're using. I've noticed if someone does a non-lossy screen capture of some ClearType text on a computer set up for the opposite sub-pixel color order than what I use, the text looks crappy and has that rainbow effect. Another aspect is screen pivoting, analog connection and/or aggressive contrast enhancement in GPU or monitor.

Re:Great! Until HP service swaps it for inferior p

[LinuxDon]

Was it by any chance a consumer laptop instead of a business laptop?

I've found the consumer warranty service to be extremely crappy. On the other hand, the warranty service on their business products is excellent as long as you have the proper maintenance contracts (if/when required).

And the reason that 32-bit color flopped?

[whitroth]

For a simple reason: THE HUMAN EYE CAN ONLY DISTINGUISH AROUND 5M SHADES.

You can't *see* the 16M that 24 bit color delivers, stupid.

          mark "and, btw, I have this subatomic pet dog, sorry, you can't even
                          see him with an electron microscope, just take my word for it
                          that he's there. Isn't he *kewl*?!"

Re:And the reason that 32-bit color flopped?

[hypnagogue]

Have you ever actually tried looking at a 24 bit gradient? Notice any color banding below #808080?

Re:Come back after you've turned off anti-aliasing

[Jeff DeMaagd]

No, it's not. There is a program that tests out the order and it gets the order right. And getting the wrong order really does look very obviously bad.

It's impossible to not get the rainbow effect using the ClearType, it's a matter of how noticeable it is, it's just inherent to how it works. This is because the edges have to be different colors in order to to be able to use the effect. Getting the subpixel order right only minimizes rainbowing.