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."

Comments

GIMMEH

[Aphoxema]

I WANT IT. I don't really know why, though...

Registration

[jefu]

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.

Re:Registration

[cblack]

Not to mention that the justechn link for one is already down/suspended for bandwidth cap with only a handful of comments posted.

Re:Registration

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're missing the point. Linking to yourself presents a bit of a conflict of interest.

Dithering

[Thelasko]

Did they determine those specs using the same calculations Mac used.

Confused...

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

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.

Re:Hype

[Colonel Korn]

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. I'm amazed at how uninformed you and most of the posters seem to be. You can prove that the eye can distinguish, VERY EASILY, between 16.7 million and 1 billion colors, and you can do it right now.

1) Open photoshop.

2) Make a gradient from 0-0-0 RGB to 255-0-0 RGB. This covers every possible variation of the red channel in a 16.7 million color space. Draw the gradient across your whole screen.

3) Look at the color banding and say, "Oh, I guess I can see why 30 bit color would be noticeable."

Re:Hype

[Firehed]

True. But stick most people watching American Idol in front of a 52" screen and they'll be too enthralled by the size and brightness to notice the image/video quality. If they're willing to put up with that kind of programming, you can't expect them to be overly picky about AV quality. It's not called the idiot box for nothing, even if it would be more aptly named the idiot panel these days.

Remember - "bigger is better" for most people. I can hardly watch typical HDTV due to how hard they stomp on the video for compression, as the macro blocking is too distracting to me (web content tends to be better, as most web producers actually CARE about that kind of thing). At least SDTV tends to be too soft of a picture to have bad macro blocking, and they don't need to compress it has hard in the first place to send it down the tubes.