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

Hype

[mathimus1863]

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.

Re:Hype

[egomaniac]

I bought a 50" plasma some years ago, and was showing a few of my friends SDTV channels versus HDTV channels. Now, this was a very high-end plasma, properly calibrated, showing some of the prettiest content on Discovery HD, so we are talking a KICK YOU IN THE FACE improvement that anybody with half a brain should have been able to appreciate.

One was suitably impressed. The second said that she could kind of see a difference, but didn't really care. The third said she couldn't even tell.

I suspect these are the same people that buy a nice 24" LCD and then run it in 800x600 resolution. Sadly, I have seen this. After fixing it, I have then seen these same people maintain that aside from the aspect ratio change, they couldn't tell the difference.

Evidently a lot of people desperately need glasses and have absolutely no idea how bad their vision is. The weird part is that even when this is pointed out to them -- "Wait, you seriously can't tell the difference between 800x600 and 1920x1200? Please, for the love of Zeus get your eyes checked!" -- they generally act completely nonplussed and never bother to see an optometrist. I just don't get it. Why do so many people not care about having sharp eyesight?

Re:Just a bit of overkill

[Hijacked Public]

I don't particularly want 1 billion colors, I actually just want 1 new one: black.

Not a very slightly gray-black, but silver-print-face-of-the-half-dome black.

Re:Here's a proper link

[dkf]

Does it use the same number of pixels per channel? I hope not. Here's why: the human eye is not equally sensitive to each of the three primary colors; we can see quite a lot finer differences in green than in blue (red comes between the two extremes). To show this, create a simple monochromatic stepped gradient image in green and another in blue. Now eyeball them using a viewer that doesn't do fancy gamma correction; on a 24bpp display you should be able to see the steps on the green image (assuming normal color vision) but you'll have real problems doing that with the blue image.