Slashdot Mirror
HP Introduces First-Ever 30-bit, 1 Billion Color Display
justechn writes "I recently had the opportunity to see, first hand, HP's new 30-bit, 1 billion color LCD display. I have to say I am impressed. Not only is the HP Dreamcolor LP2480zx capable of displaying so much more than standard LCDs, but it considered a Color Critical display. This means if you work with videos or photos you can be guaranteed that what you see is what it is supposed to look like. With 6 built-in color spaces (NTSC, SMPTE, sRGB, Rec. 709, Adobe RGB and DCI), you can easily switch to the one that best suits your applications and process. At $3,499, it is too expensive to be a consumer level LCD, but compared to other Color Critical displays (which can cost as much as $15,000 and $25,000) this is a real bargain. This display was a joint venture between HP and DreamWorks animation. When I talked to the executives of DreamWorks, they were very excited about this display because it solved a huge problem for them."
I WANT IT. I don't really know why, though...
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
anyone have a link that DOESN'T require a login?
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
Oh God, I don't know why I had to say that, there goes my Karma...
http://gizmodo.com/5014879/hp-dreamcolor-lp2480zx-shows-off-its-one--billion-colors
It doesn't look like anything special to me. I guess I don't need to upgrade my current monitor.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
It might be better to avoid stories from people (justechn, roland p, etc) that just link to their websites. Especially those that require registration.
Slashdot should not be giving these guys (and their like) the free publicity that they figure they deserve.
Did they determine those specs using the same calculations Mac used.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Don't have time to find all of the references but most of the human race cannot distinguish that many colors, except possible the few who have the extra color rod in their eyes. Most of us cannot see more than about 1 million colors, I believe.
Cool technology, though.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
This is really just hype more than anything. Remember that article about like 50% of people with HDTVs think they are viewing in HD but it turns out they're not (b/c of having wrong cables, etc)? It's the same with colors--the eyes just can't distinguish between a display with 10 million colors and a billion colors. Personally I think you're wasting your money buying this thing. But at the very least, maybe the price of "inferior" monitors will go down if this goes mainstream, so I shouldn't complain.
HP's new 30-bit, 1 billion color LCD display.
Or, put another way, yet another display that can show about 999 million more colors than most people can tell apart (or in my case, 999,999,000, aka "six-nines of wasted color").
With 6 built-in color spaces [...snip...] you can easily switch to the one that best suits your applications and process.
Translation - Users will always pick the wrong one, "guaranteeing" that they never see the right thing.
Is "considered color critical" anything other than meaningless hype? Is there a graphics card that can feed it with more than 24bits of color information, and any software that works with that combination? More importantly, what's the resolution of the display, how black is it's black, and is it's colour gamut any larger than a normal monitor?
I'd need a lot more information before I consider this to be a competitor to the SWOP certified 2560x1600 pixel screen I'm using now.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
They make it sound like out-of-the-box you're going to get the best image possible. But that's not the case. The color profile for the monitor needs to be adjusted to match reality (using something like ColorVision's Spyder2)before you can make that claim. There's no point in having billions of colors if they're all wrong.
I recently had the opportunity to see, first hand, HP's new 30-bit, 1 billion color LCD display. I have to say I am impressed.
This doesn't get you much unless the display also has a wide dynamic range- and it doesn't, it's 1000:1, which is pretty average (ratios range from 700:1 to 2000:1 in Dell's lineup, for example.) Ie, keep the same 'color resolution' (which is useless past the eye/brain recognition point) and make the gamut and DR larger.
I especially don't see why the submitter is "impressed", since he/she hasn't seen it in person- only marketing photos (at, ahem, 24 bit color) showing the new display with its brightness cranked up.
Please help metamoderate.
I thought the number of colors the average human can see is less than 1 million. Seems pointless to go beyond 24-bit displays.
And here my world has been limited to Crayola's 64-count box. Wow. Who'd have thunk it?
I tried to look at the stunning images of the new monitor. Besides being slashdotted, I gave up realizing I'd be looking at their stunning display on my MacBook, which only pretends to do millions of colors anyway.
Nothing for me to see here. I'm moving along.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Actually I did see it in person. I apologize about my website going down. It looks like I got slashdotted.
JusTech'n - Where Technology comes home
While this display costs 5 to 10 times less than its current competition, it probably won't attract anyone outside the special niche of professional video editing. Which is, definitely, a large niche, don't get me wrong, but for 99% of people the existing displays which cost 10 times less, provide the same quality and experience.
Before you mod me as "troll" (believe me, I was modded as troll for much less), think about this: would you rather spend $3000 on a display, or $300 on a display of the same resolution and brightness, and the rest on occasional romantic dinners with your GF or wife, for the rest of the year? I know what my choice would be.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
that pr0n drives all technology.
Umm, how?
Print reflects light, montors emit light. You can get close-ish, but that's about it.
All in all, if you still want acurate color, you'll still need to do a print/press check.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
That's nice, but what OS / software combo actually supports 30 bit colour displays? (as TFA is already dead...)
3D display from Paycheck to hit the markets.
Anyone know what the response time on this is? Did they relax the times to get the wider gamut? Color is great but fast response times are what I really want. I could not find any information in the link(s), so it must not be that good or they'd be touting that, too. How can you do video editing with a low response time?
today is spelling optional day.
This display might work for reliable color matching, but not for the reasons supplied.
The main problem with getting color on one object, say a display monitor, to look exactly the same as on another object, say a magazine page, is mostly the problem of gamma, a nonlinear contrast range in different light levels. And, of course, the differing illumination of the two objects in different places, which is the actual source of the possible range of colors that can be seen coming from the object.
The human eye is very sensitive to different spectral content of light detected coming from objects. Sunlight starts out with different colors than the light shining on a display monitor or generated by the display. The magazine in the sunlight filters a range of colors through its ink, then reflecting off the paper (which is itself some color, even if that color is "close" to "white"), back through the ink, and to the eye. The display monitor's light starts out a different color from the sunlight, then is filtered through and reflected from very different materials than ink and paper. By the time the light reaches the eye from each object, they're very different. And each instance is a little different, owing to manufacturing quality variations.
And then gamma has to be factored in, which tends to dominate the color content reaching the eye. The gamma is a kind of nonlinear "contrast" (as in a TV control) in different frequencies, varying as the intensity of the same illumination is increased. But even that illumination generally isn't just the same color at all intensities, because it's emitted from some manufactured material that has its own gamma (or emission equivalent) and "color temperature" bias. Which is in turn different from sunlight, which is more stable in its source color range than most manufactured materials (except lasers, a completely different kind of illumination that looks completely different from sunlight).
Color calibration works best when there's a feedback loop of the data passed between different output objects (like paper/ink and a display monitor), linked by a video sensor (that has its own color calibration problems). It's an extremely hard problem. When I was a member of the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG, who created the image file format - I helped with the color spaces spec), we spent a lot of time getting it close enough for commercial use. But we knew enough to tell that "solving" the problem 100% was not going to work. And even now, almost two decades later, it's still not solved. But every few years new tech makes it affordable for industries to add another "9" to what was once 99.999% accurate. The 30 bit gamut of this display monitor means that it doesn't constrain the range of colors as much as have old technologies. But the calibration requries sophisticated processes and software to automate them, as well as a method for comparing to actual outputs. And it still can't account for variances in manufacturing the target output media.
For Hollywood, this problem might be close to solved, though. Because movies are moving to digital projection, which can be manufactured to high precision of consistency in materials and their interaction with light, and from the same parts as the production display monitors. If all the theaters used the same DLP chips, LEDs and image surfaces (or to the precisely same standard specs) for their projectors as the studios did for all their display monitors and as all people did for their home TVs, then colors would be pretty close to identical in all those environments (except for that variable ambient lighting). These display monitors might flexibly replicate a lot of different environments to match, but the matched objects are still highly variable. For $3500, they better deliver something good.
--
make install -not war
People who might want this monitor are likely to know about color calibration tools (and already possess one or more of them ;)
24-bit RGB comprises 256 shades of grey. It is said, that humans can usually distinguish about 500 grey levels, which is corresponding to 27-bit color depth. It sounds reasonable to me, to round that number up to 10 bits per channel, 30 bit in total.
I want a LCD, SED, or whatever that has rich colors like old fashion CRTs. None of the affordable LCDs do that right now. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
what irony!
this site justecn or whatever is hosted at gator and they took it off line! right after i read another article which refered to hostgator here on slashdot!
heh!
_ In Egypt Networks: Network Solutions with a Twist
Aw mon don be hipicrit. Yer poyntles vulgrisms er az awfel ez hiz badd speling. Melo owt.
One... BILLion colours...!
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Give me a call when they make one with a CMYK output.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Damn my eyes
Does anyone else see the irony in viewing a Colour Critical Display on a non-Colour-Critical-Display? :/
To date, I have not seen any LCD or Plasma monitor that can perform as well as certain projection D-ILAs in terms of the combination of luminance ranges, good black levels, contrast ratios, gamma accuracy, viewing angle, and coverage of the Rec. 709 gamut. But don't take my word for it, here the Plasma Display coalition admits they can only cover 80% of Rec. 709 with their best displays, with many more falling in the 75% department.
From a digital television perspective I am much more interested in monitor gamut effectively covering the Rec. 709 color space, because that is all I can put on TV. Sure, it's OK to have extended gamut outside Rec. 709, but if you can't actually cover all of Rec. 709 gamut I don't care if you cover color outside that space. Similarly, I'm sure digital cinema people want the DCI gamut covered well first before having coverage outside that gamut.
On the LCD side, the production lines are changing so rapidly that two versions of the same type of panel from different months will have different results. I have seen a $300 Dell LCD computer monitor perform better than some professional television LCD displays that are priced 10 times as much.
My suggestion is to measure displays yourself, and ignore marketing literature. Of course, you need a good broadcast engineering lab to do that, not all networks have such a thing...
If you want to know what you need in a good monitor, see the EBU User requirements for Video Monitors. SMPTE is working on a set of recommendations as well.
I'm hoping that OLED displays will come to the rescue, but it will take a while for them to come up to needed sizes and maturity.
The LCD display on my several-year-old Compaq laptop is quite unreliable in terms of viewing true color, for the simple reason that the contrast of different colors changes significantly depending on the vertical viewing angle. I can often make low-contrast or dark photos more visible by tilting the display away from me (to make them darker) or toward me (to make them lighter, but with some light colors fading to white and ironically white turning to gray). Different colors seem to behave somewhat differently. At extreme angles, some colors saturate but background details that are otherwise nearly invisible may become apparent. The "correct" angle seems to be a matter of subjective judgment, and sometimes I'll double check on my CRT display to make sure the colors of something I'm posting are reasonable.
So is the change with viewing angle not a problem anymore? Are LCDs good enough to be used for professional graphics work? Is there an objective spec of the insensitivity of color fidelity to viewing angle that a professional should look for?
If you take a photo of the sun and look at the image on this monitor, you can blind yourself.
Not buying if it doesn't have built-in speakers.
Apple could easily buy such panels and market them at that price.
I know i'd save for and buy one, as I believe in quality over quantity, and it would be a good way to reaffirm to photography professionals that they still care about them.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Because to not do so is problematic for the computer which is controlling it. There's also the issue that what we REALLY see the best is greys. If you have a different number of bits per channel, you'll run in to the problem of not being able to do truly neutral greys (as was a problem in 16-bit 5-6-5 colour mode). Because of our grey perception, there's already been 10-bit black and white medical displays out there. Finally, it would be silly to artificially cripple the display.
LCDs function by filtering light through red, blue and green filters, and then blocking part or all of the light to specific sub pixels. So if you can have 1024 driving levels for one sub pixel, you can have it for all of them. No reason to restrict the pixels that happen to have red and blue filters instead of green.
So this display is 10-bits per primary colour channels, giving 1024 steps for grey, 1,073,741,824 total possible different colours.
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
You can get LCDs that have better colour, both in terms of gamut and in terms of quality, than a CRT today. Problem is you don't get them in the bargain bin. The NEC LCD2690WUXi is quite superior to even professional CRTs in my opinion (and I happen to have a LaCie Electron22Blue IV to compare it to). The gamut is no question superior, you can measure that, but the subject colour quality is just great too. Thing it it's over $1000.
Cheapest you can probably find a "better than CRT" panel is about $700 for a Doublesight DS-263N. Same IPS panel as the NEC, just less advanced electronics backing it up. Still, better colour than any CRT out there.
However cheap and good just don't go together. If you want a budget LCD, well you get the budget image.
Though having an LED backlight means it will have a very large gamut. The NEC LCD2180WG-LED has an exceedingly wide gamut, enough that it can completely cover the aRGB and original NTSC spaces and then some.
So this display has a nice wide gamut AND precise steps of colour.
Quoted contrast ratios on LCD screens are like PMPO (peak music power output) figures on boom box stereo systems - largely meaningless in the real world. I could have a display quting the most magnificant contrast ratio, which when I turn the room light on, completely makes the quoted contrast ratio figure irrelavant.
Constantly releasing crappy movies.
Calibrates both Monitor & Printer, so the color will be the same,
so long as you're using the correct ambient-light color-temperature
for viewing the printed version.
Only $500 or so ( unlike the *high-end* calibration X-rite stuff )
Having gotten into digital photography and high dynamic range imaging lately, I can see how this thing would be great for photographers / artists. But how do you drive it? Does your average video card have the capability to drive this? I thought most consumer hardware was pretty much limited to 24-bit colour. (Or what they call 32-bit but is really 24-bit plus an 8-bit alpha channel.)
TZ
I'm sure there are people who can easily distinguish the extra color depth. example anecdotal stuff: 1. you can't notice more than 30fps Reply: yeah, ma'b in a slow moving scene. When I play a fast pace FPS, I notice when I drop below 45-50fps. 2. From my Parent-in-Laws: Our DSL T.V. looks as good as dvd Reply: Are you blind?! Every time there's fast motion, blocking occurs everywhere and those skipped frames as @#$%ing me off! 3. 128kbit mp3 sounds just like cds Reply: yeah, if you flatten the high end and love audio distortion on cymbals/sharp sounds Some people are blissfully unaware of how crappy stuff is. Not to say 30-bit might be over kill. I know 128bit fp calc for pixel sharers looks beautiful outputed to 24bit and I'm perfectly happy. May'b I'll start to hate 24bit for 30bit.. :-/
I attend SIGGRAPH now and then and see some of these futuristic displays. We still have a bit to go. My criteria for a "perfect display" is that it should be indistingushable from looking out of a window at the same scene. Some of the devices at SIGGRAPH are a lot better than current technology. And all I can say that its almost like looking at magic, to paraphrase Arthur Clarke.
The biggest defect is contrast or dyanmic range of intensity. When you view the banks of TVs at Best But etc, its the ones that have contrasts over 100,000 "brighter whites and darker blacks" that appear supperior. But then you run into the limitations of the camera and intermediate analog/digital signal. The ultra-high dynamic range displays at SIGGRAPH are the most stunning improvements.
Pixel resolution matters, but not as much as it used to. There are several commercial displays over 200 dpi and 5 megapixels. These are about as good as my middle-age vision.
Color resolution can be improved. I've seen six-gun displays at SIGGRAPH with the red, green, blue, yellow, cyan, and magneta. They are more vibrant for nature scenes, but not as much for city life.
3D matters too. Depth of view, auto-stereo without glasses, things changing whern you move your head. Lots of schemes at SIGGRAPH, but niot that great resolution.
All of these require simultaneous improvements in the display, camera, and carrier signal conencting the two. Its exciting to see there are substantially better displays than regularly used out there, but its unclear about the commercialization timescale. Like it took nearly a half-century to commercially implement higher-definition television.
Does windows support this depth of color, do graphics cards/drivers, do the now ubiquitous DVI standard output?
How exactly do we start using a 10 bit depth displays with current PC technology? It seems to me that everything is geared toward 8 bit color depth.
Isn't there some limit as to how much the human eye can see? How about we invest our resources into making cheap what we already have. This is the reason why hardware engineers step ahead of themselves sometimes (i.e. making tiny processors have ginormous cooling units). And what ever happened to the age-old tradition of developing in 2^x-bit?
We *DO* have very strong sensitivity to greys. But that mostly happens in our peripheral vision. Our foveolla is richer in cones, rather than rods and thus has very big colour sensitivity, but sucks at distinguishing very dark levels of grey.
This can easily be illustrated when looking at the sky, at night, when there are no cloud and no light pollution from a nearby big city : you see a lot of stars (when getting a global picture with all your visual field including peripheral vision) but if you try to look at some region in detail, some star seem to disappear (you're looking it with the high resolution / high color / but bad grey region of your retina), and then are visible again if you stop looking at them.
There's no such thing as a single resolution or a single sensitivity to colours/greys in eyes. More likely those parameters depends on the region of the retina considered. Because of our grey perception, there's already been 10-bit black and white medical displays out there. Well... not exactly. Those displays are grey, simply because most of the picture produced in radiology are, indeed, grey scale. Thankfully we happen to have good sensitivity to grey contrasts so doctors in radiology can read them (with the help of monitors that have a wide enough dynamic range of light intensity and enough steps in between to mimic the quality of actual radiology films).
On the other hand, you could imagine obtain similar visibility to fine details by using pseudo colours. The problem is that no doctor is used to to analyse rainbow coloured pictures (...I tend to be the only one liking pseudo colour scales...) and if you move the window around (the mapping of data to intensity of grey) colours completely shift around (dark region may have been cyan with one window and orange with another), whereas with a grey scale darker region are always darker grey than lighter regions.
So the reasons are not only because of compatibility with our retina, but even more so because of practical considerations (looks like the original medium, simpler to manipulate, etc...)
Pseudo colours on the hand may be very popular in engineering printout because, well, once it's printed, it's hard to play with a display window, so you better find a way to cram as much possible information even on a medium that offers not such a big dynamic range of shades.
Note that then you have scale problems, which are happily abused for example by charlatans trying to sell snake oil to lower the radiation of your cell phone : the picture with snake oil looks much less redder than the one with snake oil. But that's because the pseudo colour mapping is different between the two pictures. Not because putting a sticker on the back of the phone suddenly stops it from frying your brain.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If you have an lcd panel with 5ms or less response time, generally that is a TN panel- that is only a 6bit panel, 6x3= 18bit color.
You need an 8bit panel, IPS, MVA, (a few other types) to get the full 24 bit color display (8x3).
Most vendors are pumping out the 6bit panels- it's now hard to find the 8 bit panels. This site has a decent list of what panels are used in what monitors: http://www.flatpanels.dk/panels.php
you have to get it, cause watching porn on your CRT monitor just isn't lifelike...?
... lets you get the color just right if no one has a monitor that can display it right (aside from the small handful that get this one for their own work)?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
All this dicussion about LCDs, CRTs and colors, bah! I use LSD and I can see billions of colors nobody else can....
"But this one goes to 11!"
Are there any video cards that support the extra colors, or is there something else where the display can more accurately represent the color based on color space without actually changing the bits per channel sent from the video card? I th ink Matrox had a 30 bit video card at one point...
You are incorrect sir. It is VERY difficult to choose a monitor with an 8bit panel- the vendors aren't forthcoming with the information, and the retailers are now listing 6-bit panels as having 16.7 million colors (see Acer and Newegg)
Also, the Dell's (yes, even the Ultrasharp Series) this year is all 6-bit.
Ok, it does appear that there is a Dell 24" with an 8bit panel. Still- hardly easy to discern.
Movies,eye candy, and other products of the entertainment industry aren't critically important to the success of ultra-high resolution (UHR)video screens. (screens that have resolution higher than average human ability to see). These products are pre-edited and adjusted for color and balance by video and photography experts for the best, most profitable, and most appealing entertainment product. Which is not what UHR videos do best.
Current monitors have deep problems with specific color balance. Take a photograph, turn it into a GIF or JPG, view it on one PC and monitor. Then put another PC and monitor next to the first and view the same image file side-by-side with the first monitor. Does it look exactly identical? No Way! Is there a button that you can push on the monitor that makes a image look identical to any other monitor? None that I've ever seen.
This is the big problem. A lack of standards for color characteristics between monitors. And no technology integrated into the monitors and video circuitry that brings an image into international standards. Nothing that makes color #123456789 look exactly the same on every monitor, on earth.
When the problem of international color standards is solved and the technology is integrated into UHR monitors, then we can do things like stick a fiber optic into someone's vein in Africa, thread it up to their heart, and have a doctor in India or Chicago look at the image and make a diagnosis. Because they can trust that color and image that they are looking at on the screen is exactly what they would see if they were in the operating theater. Medicine, Robotics, Science, and manufacturing have far more important and profitable uses of UHR monitors than the entertainment industry. People are entertained and willing to pay for what the entertainment industry gives them.
Every other industry has more exacting standards.
Hey! 1920 x 1200 is only 2,304,000 pixels!!
I paid for ONE BILLION colors, and I damn well WANT one billion colors! >:-s
Others have been making 10-bit LCD's for years now. They've just been obscenely expensive and mostly sold to photographers.
I got the chance to see this monitor today and it looks great. Awesome colors, very black blacks. All made possible by an array of LED backlights. Complete overkill for your average desktop but if I were a photographer or video editor I would want a couple of these for sure. It comes factory calibrated but you can recalibrate it and upload the calibration data into the monitor. You can also press buttons on the monitor and change it between several industry standard color spaces.
I work for HP.
Yes, it does appear so, according to the flatpanels.dk site:
Dell 3008WFP (*) (widescreen) has a 30 inch 8 ms (g2g) S-IPS panel.
In retrospect, I had only gone through the 20" and smaller screen size looking for non-tn panels, and was foiled in that size range.