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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 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.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
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.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
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?
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck