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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 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?"
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.
That's not quite right.
CIELAB colour space codes colours as L (lightness) with a 0 - 100 range, and a/b (red-green / yellow-blue) each with about a +/- 100 range for physically realizeable colours. A pair of colours which are just distinguishable are a unit apart, so we can distinguish very roughly 100 * 100 * 100 colours, or a million.
However those are surface reflectances under a single illuminant. In a natural scene, your eye is adapting constantly as you look around. Your iris changes size, your retina changes sensitivity, and so on. The range of lightnesses in a natural scene is up to about 10 billion to 1 if you compare direct sunlight to deep shadow. You can distinguish a million colours at each of these points of adaptation.
If you want a display that can show a full range of dark colours and a full range of light colours, you need more than a million to 1.
And I, as a man, fear anything and anyone that can handle more than the 16 colors I can differentiate and all the marital skirmished derived from that fact.
My 0.02 cents
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."
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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
One... BILLion colours...!
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Frankly, most daily tasks don't require good eyesight. I don't even bother wearing my glasses unless I'm reading signs or driving or something. And my level of eyesight actually requires correction; a lot of people have less-than-perfect eyesight that's still legal to drive with.
When I go to the movie theater or watch a DVD on a big screen or something (if I'm watching on my laptop, I can already see every pixel at a comfortable viewing distance), I do put on my glasses so I can enjoy the sharpness (if it's that sort of movie; some movies are better without being pixel-perfect sharp).
However, for everyday life, it provides marginal benefit. And corrective lenses inevitably introduce other kinds of distortion, which I find give me a headache. Certainly if I want to make sure something is straight and level, I take off my glasses, because I can't trust my lenses to match what my brain has been wired over the years to perceive as straight.