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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.
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.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
how am I supposed to see how good this display is if they don't show me a picture of it?
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.
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.)
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.
.. 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
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.
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.
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!
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.
Mostly random stuff.
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.
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.
It's naÃve to treat the human vision system like a camera. The two things are very different.
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.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
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.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it