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Is the 4th Yellow Pixel of Sharp Quattron Hype?
Nom du Keyboard writes "Sharp Aquos brand televisions are making a big deal about their Quattron technology of adding a 4th yellow pixel to their RGB sets. While you can read a glowing review of it here, the engineer in me is skeptical because of how all the source material for this set is produced in 3-color RGB. I also know how just making a picture brighter and saturating the colors a bit can make it more appealing to many viewers over a more accurate rendition – so much for side-by-side comparisons. And I laugh at how you are supposed to see the advantages of 4-color technology in ads on your 3-color sets at home as you watch their commercials. It sounds more like hype to extract a higher profit margin than the next great advance in home television. So is it real?"
i'd be much more interested if it was a colour that RGB couldn't produce.
To get truly astonishing pictures, they should add a black pixel, to improve contrast.
You can't see the difference because you are a flatlander and the 4th pixel is in the 4th dimension.
No.
Don't make me say it a third time.
It strikes me that a better use of a fourth colour pixel would be to represent all those greens the RGB colour space doesn't actually represent.
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It's like the "120 hz lcd display" stuff. The dvd they use to show you the difference in-store is bogus. If you want REALLY sharp, you'd buy a 600hz plasma. The whole screen changes from one image to the next in 1/600 of a second, with no interpolation (and interpolation algorithms are just "best guesses", so they're no better than an upscaler would be).
And I laugh at how you are supposed to see the advantages of 4-color technology in ads on your 3-color sets at home as you watch their commercials.
Well, I'm not sure if you're correct to laugh at this or not. But all televisions are approximations of something analogue that was captured and in that capturing process, some information was lost. To illustrate, entertain a scenario where I have N standard definition television sets that are displaying footage from standard definition video cameras. I daisy chain them together (each camera directed at the last screen) to record something. As I move from the 0th screen to the Nth screen, I will begin to see degradation as more information is lost and randomness comes into play. The same can be done with HD but since HD captures more information, it can safely be assumed that the sampling and resampling will retain more of the original image.
If you played the Nth HD screen next to the Nth SD screen and piped that through an SD television, you'd still be able to see some difference (for reasonable non-astronomical numbers of N) even though you went through yet another SD television in the end.
I don't know what the fourth color is supposed to buy, I'm unfamiliar with this technology. But the side by side comparison through an SD or HD TV might still be able to demonstrate that the fourth color adds some meaningful information to the image that -- when resampled to be viewed on your device -- suffers less information loss than the three color implementation. Thus successfully demonstrating some superiority. Not showing you precisely what the final product is supposed to be like but instead give you relativity in signal loss and noise.
I also know how just making a picture brighter and saturating the colors a bit can make it more appealing to many viewers over a more accurate rendition
Well, I know that there is a huge photography following that is totally enamored with HDR photography and to many people it makes the images come to life ... I think it's overdone (like autotuning in modern music) but it definitely has a place. Perhaps similarly four color displays hope to widen the dynamic range they can display? I wish I could give you better answers about four color displays but this is the first I've heard of them. Perhaps your questions to a large engineer base are the most effective kind of marketing?
My work here is dung.
The purpose of introduction the Y is to increase the colour gambit. Theoretically, more colors = more "realistic" images. I think that if you can notice the difference between a picture and the actual object (not in terms of dimension, but in therms of the actual colors) then it's likely that a larger colour gambit would be beneficial.
uhh, human eyes only have RGB cones. therefore, if there is a RGB technology out there that achieves a wide enough gamut, then it should be more than sufficient. if the extra Y pixels achieve a wider gamut then the difference should be clear. otherwise it's just clever marketing garbage.
Puny human eyeballs only have three kinds of cones, one that peaks in response to red, one to green, and one to blue. While our superior alien overlords may be pleased with this new technology, physiologically, you can't tell the difference.
Adding an extra phosphor can extend your gamut, increase your dynamic range within your gamut, or give you finer quantization within the gamut, or some combination of all three. The fact that your source material is provided as three quantities (YCbCr, not RGB) doesn't mean four phoshors won't help.
Doesn't mean it will, either.
Time to wait for all the /.ers who don't actually understand colour theory pipe up with comments of how 3 colors is more than enough for everything simply because it was a design choice that was made several decades ago.
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To be as real as quoting extrapolated mega pixels to sell digital cameras.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
"all the source material for this set is produced in 3-color RGB" Is that true? I'm no expert, but is the signal not YUV? Does that make a difference? Has anyone seen a side by side comparison in person?
Using Photoshop or The Gimp, open an RGB or Camera RAW photograph that has a lot of saturated reds and blues.
Now convert that RGB file to a CMYK file.
Convert it back to RGB.
You'll notice that because RGB has a wider color gamut than CMYK, the highly saturated colors of the RGB file with become subdued and muddy when converted to CMYK. You'll also notice that they don't return to the image when you convert that CMYK file to an RGB file.
So as far as this TV is concerned, you can throw any current video standard at it, from broadcast to Blu-Ray to whatever and you will never get any higher color gamut than the original source, which was engineered for RGB in/out. You'd have to have an entire pipeline from production to consumer based on RGBY to get a better image on this TV than on an RGB model.
Like the old saying goes, garbage in, garbage out. This TV is just a bunch of hype to separate videophiles from their money. Just like the $400 wooden stereo knobs, $125 Monster HDMI cables and $1,000 one-way Ethernet cables.
As the FS says, "all the source material for this set is produced in 3-color RGB".
So while you might get an improved gamut with this, it won't be accurate color reproduction. Same with the LED sets that advertise things like "123% of televisions gamut". No way to accurately map that color onto your existing source media well.
Representing yellow with a mix of green and red is already a hack. What's wrong with software determining that the color of a pixel is yellow and actually lighting up a yellow light?
Maybe a yellow light looks more convincing than a red and green light right next to each other. I'd want to see for myself before making blanket judgments.
Their marketing material actually made a lot of sense. They claim that by adding the yellow subpixel, they can increase the contrast of the display. Previously, a yellow pixel was made by displaying both the red and green subpixels at the same time. These are both pretty dark colors. In order to make the yellow they produced vibrant, the screen had to have the backlight on very bright. This means that the blacks became washed out. With the yellow subpixel, the display needs less backlight to produce a bright yellow, thus they can dim the backlight and produce equally bright images. Producing deep blacks is one of the primary problems with LCD displays, so this is a pretty nice advance if it works. The review you linked to seems to indicate that the method they are using did end up working, so it's probably not hype.
... the red one actually "peaks" at yellow.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
At first blush it appears to be hype but I am trying to keep an open mind because of something that happened to me when I saw my first HD TV picture. I was of the opinion that HD couldn't be that much better than SD. Shortly after I saw my first HD images I was ready to admit that I was wrong. From the moment I laid eyes on HD I knew there was a whole new world out there! I am now a certifiable HD snob. I don't know what I did before but I do know I watched less TV.
I haven't seen one of the new TVs yet to day I think it makes a difference or not. I will know, and probably rather quickly when I see it if I believe it or not. The first place I will look is at white/black interfaces. That should tell me a lot.
I really do hope it is hype. I think the 47" TV is a little too big to be moved into the bedroom.
As many others have pointed out, it doesn't matter how many primary colors the set is capable of displaying if the signal only uses three. This reminds me of a scanner I saw about ten years or so ago that was capable of recording scans in a 48-bit mode, if the software was capable of using the extra bits. If (and only if) you looked very closely at the text on the box, you'd see a note that few, if any scanner packages supported 48-bit color. It also didn't tell you that it was highly unlikely that any scanner software would ever support that, because 32-bit color could already encode more colors than the human eye could distinguish. It's possible, I suppose, that there's some kind of scientific use for such a thing, but I doubt that consumer-grade software will ever need it. I suspect that this New! Improved! Shiny! technology is just more of the same.
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First - if it's working correctly you shouldn't even notice it. Second, Sanyo has been doing this for a few years in their projectors. The yellow panel helps warm up the color range and keep your tv's backlight from getting too far in the blue range. Read Sanyo's whitepaper: http://us.sanyo.com/shared/docs/QuaDrive_SANYO_WhitePaper08.pdf Alternatively try searching for Sanyo Quadrive
First, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut for reference. The sample gamut picture in the top right shows a typical CRT--lets assume for the sake of argument that LCDs are similar.
If you add a yellow LED to that it just isn't going to add much. The yellow part of the spectrum is already fairly well represented.
*But* if they also change the hue of the green LED toward the blue spectrum then it has a good chance of really opening up the gamut.
The people saying RGB is enough don't understand chromaticity--go look for gamut plots of your favorite output devices and see how little of the full spectrum of colors they can actually reproduce. Printers are especially embarrassing. Your eyes can really see a whole lot of color detail.
There. Now go play some cool javascript games!
The RGB values you send to your TV are according to a specific standard, and by definition cover some theoretical gamut in color space. It is unlikely that you emitter (i.e., TV) exactly covers the same color gamut in color space. Most likely, it only covers a subset. By adding an extra color a larger portion of the theoretical input gamut can be covered. So theoretically, it is possible to get better color fidelity.
When you use better gear at home than any recording studio on the planet uses, you're wasting money.
Some people believe that since we have just two ears that stereo sound is enough. Others, on the other hand, believe the experience to be enhanced with 5.x surround sound systems.
I have not seen the results of this 4th yellow pixel display, but I might guess that there comes with it a newer and better enhancement over traditional RGB output. One might believe that since the eyes can only see combinations of red, green and blue light, that display devices only need to produce light of those colors. But perhaps there is something to be added by a yellow pixel even if yellow is the blending of green and red light. But if that's true, then we will also see cyan and magenta lighted enhancements to follow I think...
The discrete R,G,B pixels on your monitor give out discrete, finite waveforms. Think of a Fourier transform frequency analysis with 3 spikes. now, our eyes have red, green, and blue cones, so you'd think that would be enough, right? -
wrong. look at any place lit by an older (or cheaper) fluorescent light. they have worse band gaps in the frequencies of light that they let off, and they start to give headaches. this is because peoples' R,G,B cones actually overlap the wavelengths they percieve. whereas the discrete R,G,B pixels in your TV are, as I said, rather narrow.
So enter yellow. yellow was a good choice: it's mid-way between red and green. (red + blue = purple, green + blue = teal). It helps to fill in that gap, even with source material captured with discrete R,G,B technology. But, speaking of that, those overlap a lot more than your TV does. there's little filters that cover each of the tiny pixels on the sensors, and those let in more than the narrow range of light than is reproduced on your TV. so technically speaking, this DOES help you to perceive things, that are there in the source, that normal TV technology isn't capable of reproducing/
the only question IMO is how wide this yellow is - does it overlap the red and the green? if we had a teal that overlapped the green and blue, then we'd have even better quality.
Although our cones peak at red, green and blue, the data is not sent to our brain in that format. The retina has some wiring that remaps the colour onto axes of red vs. green on one axis, and blue vs. yellow on the other axis.
I'm guessing this ties back to evolutionary origins, when the red cone didn't exist in mammals (early primates, most other mammals).
Oh, you mean like a 240 Hertz refresh rate, when the actual changes to the product cost virtually nothing? Or "LED" TVs that aren't driven by LEDs at all but merely backlit by them?
I would have thought that red-green-blue was optimal because they correspond to the sensitive peaks of the three varieties of cone cells in the human eye. Does an extra pixel colour really provide any extra information if you are not one of the rare people with a mutation that adds an extra cell type in your eye that makes you tetrachromatic?
(I'm suddenly curious though if people who have been raised on watching RGB screens while growing up end up wiring their brains differently than those who look at real light ... *runs off to read*)
What you just said might as well have been doublespeak. It says nothing at all. Why bother?
It's for the birds. They see a wider color spectrum than us.
You haven't seem the Simpsons until you've seen it on a Quattron.
Right?
/obscure? Hopefully not for the /. crowd...
I'd like to know why CMYK wouldn't be better?
Is that it works around the fact that regular RGB has CMY on the other side of its scale.
So, as a single pixel goes from Blue to Yellow you sacrifice the "blueness" every time you try to show off bright Reds and Greens in the picture.
Or vice versa when you are going for a stronger purples, blues and dark greens. Red kills Cyan, Green kills Magenta and Blue kills Yellow.
Which translates in both cases in loss of color range and harsher contrasts.
Now... adding an additional pixel to the equation you get more range in the blues while having strong yellows.
Which means wider reds without sacrificing blues and cyans, and wider greens without sacrificing blues and magentas.
Like I said... I am only guessing, but it sounds to me that the review is describing something quite like that.
With the two TVs sitting next to each other, the thing that became immediately obvious was how harsh and garish the colours on my Samsung set now appeared.
The 46LE821E produced much subtler and more realistic colours, especially on skin-tones.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Digital images are displayed in RGB, yes.
But colors are printed in CMYK (Cyan Magenta Yellow Black), and you'll notice that the best photo inkjet printers have more than just those four color cartridges. They often have the four plus "photo cyan", "photo magenta", etc. and it does make a huge difference.
As you know, some colors cannot be accurately expressed in CMYK, nor can some in RGB (even though theoretically any color is possible, but theory is not reality in this case).
While the extra color may or may not make a big difference, there is at least precedent indicating that the idea is sound.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
"And I laugh at how you are supposed to see the advantages of 4-color technology in ads on your 3-color sets at home as you watch their commercials."
But the script of the commercial is written almost entirely with deference to that fact.
The estimable Mr. Takei tells you, while you're no doubt ogling his adam's apple instead of listening, that he can't actually show you the difference itself, but, "I can show you this," wherupon he looks at the screen and gives his review in a single, somewhat gaudily overacted word.
I'm not sure how anyone misses that, since his behavior is utterly bizarre without the concept of telling-not-showing being in play.
Unless I'm female and one of the 10% who possess the mutation that codes for tetrachromacy then I can.
http://regmedia.co.uk/2010/05/07/quattron_4.jpg That just about sums up the entire article.
If you look at the color spectrum and its frequencies, you will notice the following:
red -- 610 to 760 nm
gap - 590 to 620 nm
green -- 500 to 570 nm
blue -- 450 to 500 nm
Now I couldn't find any actual explanation on the net for why Yellow would make a better picture. But if you look at the frequencies above, you will notice that adding yellow DOES do something. It reduces the gap between Red and Green by half; Yellow is in that gap, and comprises the frequencies from 570 to 590.
By this theory, maybe adding Orange (590 to 610 nm) would make an even more realistic picture?
How long have you been a homophobe with no life? At least 9 years, seemingly...
I am not talking about the American people and the British people, I am talking about those yellow pixels. They have started throwing those pixels, but they are not pixels, they are booby traps to kill the children.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
If it was Violet instead of Yellow.
What I'm trying to figure out is HOW the Sharp Tv would know, via a STANDARD COLOR SIGNAL what yellow is,
since, unless they've changed the national color signal (NTSC/PAL or whatever your country uses), the standard
signals are R,G,B and Y(Chromo) signal. There is NO yellow signal, so how is the tv going to "turn on & off" yellow
unless there is some sort of "black box" that decodes the RGB-Y(chromo) and converts it to RGBY-Y(chromo).
I guess once one of these gets into the hands of an independent engineer, no one will know.
If they had a pixel that would hype the RGB pixels as much as they hype their ads, you would go blind watching their sets.
Ohhhhmyyy...
Now you're just hatin'. They say right in the ad, how you can't see the difference because you're watching a regular TV, but you can see "THIS" and the screen turns 90 degrees so you can see how thin it is (and the asian dude goes 'whhhooooww'). Anyways, I saw one in a BestBuy yesterday, and all I can say is that it looked very, very nice. I was impressed with the overall color (yeah, it was mostly just saturation, but Avatar was playing so it worked) as well as motion smoothness.
Take a look at that picture again.
Notice the other major color areas that don't have their own pixel on the monitor? This picture might help.
Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and White. There is also Black but that one is considered as absence of light here. On the picture in the link, black is on the one corner we don't see.
So, mostly for economic reasons and simplicity we use just 3 pixels to describe 8 major points in the light spectrum. And all the colors in between.
With the fourth pixel, we are getting 4:8 ratio instead of 3:8. Four pixels for every single color in the spectrum instead of 3.
Which is exactly ONE THIRD MORE than RGB.
So... not 25%. Just in the color range you get 33.3% more.
Now... how much it costs them to produce that 33.3% is another thing - and we will probably never know that exactly as there is probably a lot of R&D involved in there too.
Are you arguing that it is not fair for them to include the R&D costs into the price?
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his own brow? Or a corporation? Corporations are people too, you know?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I was going to post a satire of the Quattron commercial, but /. prevented me with "Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters."
The characters I used were all standard ASCII, WTF?!
I'm a logged in user, with good Karma, have a few achievements according to what they tell me in my account, and they say "As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising.", though I never have.
But now I am being pre-censored, on SlashDot??!!!
I can handle being modded down. I can take losing Karma. I can handle the flame baiters.
But being pre-censored... Tell me it ain't true!
But it is true, so this forum has outlived its usefulness to me.
I know you will all miss me ; }
I never created a sig, but my last post will have this as my sig...
My first, and only, 'First Post', was modded redundant
Its true!
Waffle on about some phony dilemma concerning a product you need to get publicity for , then follow it up by asking Joe Public what he thinks. Everyone is then talking about your product, some good and some bad, but it's a damn sight more people than would have been talking about it before.
Those marketing types must think they're pretty clever.
The tone of this article isn't like the summary states. TFA doesn't portray the TV as some magical device; because the article is actually somewhat critical of the TV.
I think the thing that a lot of us don't realize, because we spend so much time looking at TV and computer screens, is that colored light isn't really a combination of red, green, and blue. The reality is that light gets its color from its wavelength; and we can get a very close approximation by combining light we perceive as red, green, and blue.
The question is, can we get a more accurate picture by using light that's closer to the original wavelength? Clearly, the information isn't lost, as the original wavelength can be inferred by digitally processing the original RGB levels.
Something to consider is that the original NTSC (American Color) TV standards didn't just include Red, Green, and Blue, but also included Yellow and Orange. These parts were essentially deprecated, but the concept of TVs displaying yellow isn't new.
No, I will not work for your startup
The thing that I love most about this complete hoax, is their demonstration. They show a picture of a "normal" display, which is very dull. Then next to it they show a picture of their "yellow pixel enhanced" display and it is much brighter and more vibrant. BUT WAIT! How can I see that difference with my "normal" display??? I would need a quad pixel display to see the difference in quad pixel displays. X( Well In their defense, making the difference seem so dramatic will really get people motivated to buy their display. Can't miss out on all that yellow after all.
Absolute bullshit. And probably uses more electricity too. I wonder what it does to the physical pixel aspect ratio as well, since adding a pixel changes the dimensions.
Quick terminology: Spectral color- Pure, single wavelength color, like a laser. Composite color- A combination of many spectral colors of different intensity.
To truly reproduce a color, each pixel should be able to not only make one spectral color, but a combination of all of them.
This would be very expensive, and fortunately, our eye have sensors only for Red 580 nm, Green 540nm, and Blue 440 nm (RGB), if we exclude the low light rods. We can therefore get away with RGB screens. There are slight errors. For example, assume each R-G-B pixel emits light matching the eyes R-G-B sensors peak sensitivity. Now, we can reproduce any light stimulation by exiting a linear combination of the three emitters. The eye however is sensitive from 380 nm to 740 nm, and can obviously not create the stimulation for neither 400 nm light, nor 700 nm, as your linear combination of only positive values will not cover these spectral colors (outside the gamut of the display). Take a picture of a prism spectrum or rainbow, and compare the original with what you see on the monitor, and you can see this.
So bottom line, RGB covers almost all colors, but adding emitters allows linear combination to cover more of the possible stimulation, but a high cost for little value. It is primarily the near UV purplish blue below 440 nm and the warm reds near IR that can not be reproduced.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
The engineer in you needs to do some reading on color. Throwing more primary colors at the problem CAN widen the gamut considerably, especially when you can't make your red/green/blues any redder/greener/bluer then they already are.
However, the suspicious consumer in you is probably quite right: this is almost certainly hype, unless broadcasters have magically gained the ability to send ICC profiles alongside their content. I'm not that hip on HDTV but I doubt this is the case.
Adding an extra phosphor can extend your gamut, increase your dynamic range within your gamut, give you finer quantization within the gamut
and increase the size of your penis.
The source material fed to your TV (e.g., through an HDMI-port) can have a somewhat big color gamut, e.g., sRGB. The sRGB color gamut is difficult to reproduce accurately with an RGB-display (but not impossible). A yellow pixel makes this much easier. Overall, the colors can appear more saturated and colorful than otherwise possible. Of course, it might just be that Sharp takes the source material and simply makes everything more colorful.
Since there are some women with the ability to differentiate a fourth primary color, it would seem that there is a very small market for a monitor with an additional color (not sure if the additional color is what the "tri"s among us call "yellow", though). Of course, there are a LOT of men with red-green colorblindness, so it might make more sense to make a cheaper monitor for them with only two colors.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/28/1536204&mode=thread
I suspected it was crap when they had George Takei as their spokesman with his hilarious overacting and poor timing.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Some of us even believe that STereo is a Much hyped Non-picasso. Given the choice of hi fidelity Mono or Low quality Stereo I'll take the Mono every time.
But the portable transistor people have to make their sets STereo due to Maaah KET TING.
Back on Track, yes this is mostly Hype with a tiny improvement in perceived quality, Just Believe me, Dont argue.
I think most our looking at this the wrong way. One of the challenges for TV/monitor panels is color reproduction, especially across the whole intensity range for each of the RGB. We know some panels are better than others, and some are really awful, but we know none of them can truly reproduce the correct colors, especially on LCD panels. If they did, the 4th color is useless unless the source of the video has the 4th color encoded. Adding the 4th color is just compensating for imperfect RGB colors on the LCD panel. The TV is trying to reproduce a spectrum of colors for your eyes see, so if the panel needs more than the 3 colors to do this, what does it matter? Ultimately it is the picture you actually see that matters.
The gamut of the human eye is is not well approximated by mixtures of RGB pixels, even if they are perfect and ideal. You can do better with four or more pixel types. Furthermore, a yellow pixel likely also gives you more brightness and contrast. Similar things are done with printers (that's why many printers have 8 inks) and even some cameras. So, no, it's not hype. How well their particular monitor works depends on how good a job they did on the implementation. As for seeing the advantages, yes, they can also show you that. Obviously, they can't make the gamut of your TV bigger, but they can make it smaller by the same amount that their TV's gamut is larger than yours.
On the other hand, your brain compensates for, and becomes accustomed to, a limited gamut. That means that after working with a limited gamut device for a while, you won't notice much anymore. But side-by-side, the difference is obvious.
A lot of TV sets that use local dimming have a big problem showing starfields. The average color in a starfield is pretty dark, so the LED goes dim and not bright enough to show the stars. It really takes the punch out of Star Wars Special^n Edition if you can't see the stars.
Why not just go to the store and look for yourself?
I recall seeing the uber-sharp yellow in the ads for this product and thinking, "If my current monitor/tv can display these commercials, can theirs really be any better? "
Those of you with longer memories will recall that Sharp made a range of TVs in the 70's with a 4th yellow phosphor. I observe that no recently-made CRT TVs had a yellow phosphor, just good old RGB... guess it didn't work too well, huh?
R +G = Y
... is squant!
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
if the source was using four color planes.... It's a iconic dilemma of our "multimedia" times: the least capable transition stage defines the quality of a media product. Be it the framerate, psychovisual quality or psychoacoustic quality. Or with 3D emerging, pseudo, badly filmed and correctly filmed 3D. Of course it's a hype as long as the source is not good enough. It's a hype just like SACD has been a hype, or HDCD or DVD-A been one, because you cannot fucking hear a difference. The sad thing though is, that we will never know if Quattron is a scam... because there's no RGBY material.
Why not violet, which is below the lowest wavelength a TV can emit (blue), and still visible to human eye?
Why not a white, a RGBW setup equivalent to CMYK?
The yellow you get by mixing red and green is pretty good already...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
DLP projectors have been using 7 color color wheels for years. I can't speak to this implementation, but it can make difference.
I'm guessing this ties back to evolutionary origins, when the red cone didn't exist in mammals (early primates, most other mammals).
Not exactly. Every information sent to the brain is processed this way : Signals aren't sent straight, instead difference (in space, in time, etc...) are sent (Most of our brain is actually working by doing comparison between signals).
The only subtlety is where this difference is computed : It's always done at the first relay between the primary sensors and the next step along the path to the brain.
- With most all other senses, this difference is computed in the spine. (That's where the first relay is).
- With sight, the difference is computed in the retina itself : the top-most layer of cell in the retina does the job (and works as the "eye's spine").
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
A subtractive cell (stacked CMYK layers, to filter out R,G,B,All respectively) would let more light through than separate R, G, B windows. The article alludes to using a primary subtractive cell (Y) to help one combination, but it would only be 100% brighter for saturated yellows (not whites); CMYK would be about 250% brighter for all colours (not just yellow) with very good blacks.
With RGB pixels on an LCD, yellow is shown by allowing light to pass through neighboring red and green subpixels. For the red subpixel, blue and green are filtered out. For the green subpixel, blue and red are filtered out. Then the eye fuses the neighboring pixels together to get yellow from two sources that have already filtered out much of the spectrum. But with a single yellow subpixel, only blue light is filtered out and more light reaches the viewer. I'm sure the effect is to make certain colors more vivid.
Additionally, the use of these yellow subpixels is also to somewhat increase the effective resolution.
I would argue that though source material was produced in RGB, the sensors used are much MUCH better at sensing colors and outputting in RGB than an RGB LCD is capable of displaying. Adding more colors to LCD output should help overcome limitations in color correctness in LCD output. LCDs have not been very well known to produce very accurate output.
Geez people. Don't go spouting opinions about color if you've never taken a graphics course.
The range of colors that humans can see is bigger than the color produced by any three-color display. No matter which three colors you use. For example see a chromaticity diagram here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/specrend/ (scroll down to the image labeled "chromaticy coordinates"). This diagram shows what colors the average human can see (if you ignore brightness; brown for example isn't shown). The three primaries in a typical RGB display are shown, and the colors they can produce lie inside a triangle. The triangle is clearly smaller than the tongue-shaped region of perceivable colors (though the effect is exaggerated because the diagram isn't perceptually uniform, but the point still stands). You can't fit a triangle inside a round region without leaving parts of the round region uncovered.
That's why having more than three primaries will give you more colors: with four primaries, you can cover a quadrilateral-shaped portion of the tongue (unless you're stupid and pick a fourth color inside the RGB triangle). Most likely the display in TFA uses a different G primary from the usual one, because adding a Yellow primary around 580nm wouldn't extend the triangle out by much. I imagine the four primaries used have dominant wavelengths of around 610nm (Red), 570nm (Yellow-green), 500nm (Blue-green), and 490nm (Blue). There will still be colors you can't produce with a 4-primary display.
As some people have mentioned, your eye adjusts to the device's gamut, and your brain will "fill in" colors that the device can't produce. The brain does this magic all the time: you "see" the color of a rose as the being the same, under many different lighting conditions.
One problem the Sharp display will run into is that the TV signal comes from cameras with only three (RGB) primaries. The display must be taking each RGB pixel, converting it to CIE XYZ coordinates, tweaking those coordinates to push the signal into the gamut region that the new display can produce, and then producing 4 values from the original 3. So the colors you see are ficticious: you can't get 4 numbers from 3 without guessing (the fancy word for "guess" is "extrapolation").
ALejo Hausner
Your eye sees only three true colors. Red, Green, and Blue.
Television is designed for human eyes. So is film, and photography. The $100,00 dollar broadcast cameras have three chips on optical block. One for Red, one for green, and one for blue. All the other "colors" are derived from these three signals.
Its a really good system, has been for over sixty years. It you TV set doesn't have yellow, it is broken.
In terms of color theory, nothing stops is potentially being real. If you expect to hook this up to some random source and get an improvement, though ... good luck. It's not going to happen. With an appropriate 10-bit or 12-bit wide-gamut source, though, it's certainly capable of better results.
The input may be 3-color (RGB), but if it's defined with a wide-gamut space like Adobe RGB, possibly with up to 16 bits of precision per colour channel, then it can represent a huge range of colours. It can do this by defining near-"perfect" primary colours and assuming perfect control over blending of those primaries.
A regular TV, though also an RGB device, has a very different gamut. That's largely because the primary colours the TV uses aren't as bright/saturated or as "perfect" as those in the Adobe RGB space, but it also can't blend its colours as well. Most likely it only uses 8 bits per colour channel, so it has a much more limited range of graduations, further forcing the colour space to be narrowed to avoid banding due to imprecision.
The regular TV must "scale" a wide-gamut input signal in a colour space like Adobe RGB to display it on its own more limited panel. It can do this by "chopping off" extreme colours, by scaling the whole lot evenly, or several other methods that're out of scope here. Point is, that they're both RGB devices, but they don't share the same colour space and must convert colours.
So, if the yellow pixel (another primary) expands the gamut of this new TV, then yes, even though it too only takes an RGB signal, it's in theory better, because it can convert a wide-gamut RGB input to its own RGBY space for display with better fidelity than a TV with the same RGB primaries but no Y channel colour achieve.
Another device might still be plain RGB, but for each of the red green and blue primaries it might have much better (closer to "perfectly red" etc) colour. This device might have an overall wider gamut (ie better range of colours) than the RGBY device, though it's likely that the RGBY device's gamut would still be capable of better yellows. (If you're struggling to figure out what I mean, google for "CIE diagram RGB CMYK" to get a feel for it).
Attaining better results through adding a channel and/or having better R,G,B primaries presumes properly colour-managed inputs to gain any benefit, though. In reality, video colour management is in a pathetic and dire state - inputs can be in any number of different colour spaces, there's no real device-to-device negotiation of colour spaces, and it's generally a mess. If you feed a "regular" narrow gamut source through to a TV that's expecting a wide gamut signal, you'll get a vile array of over-saturated over-bright disgusting colour, so this is important. Since this device would rely on wide-gamut RGB input to have any advantage, it'll need a 10-bit or 12-bit HDMI or DisplayPort input with a source that's capable of providing a wider gamut signal (say, BluRay) and is set up to actually do so rather than "scaling" the output video gamut to the expections of most devices.
The fact that most inputs only support 8 bits per channel (and thus aren't very useful for wide-gamut signals because they'll get banding/striping in smooth tones) really doesn't help.
So if this 3D movie/tv fad, which is really just stereoscopic, ever takes off, will the next gimmick be "surround cam"?
There have been a number of studies recently reporting that at least some women have four types of cones (the "colour sensors") in their eyes. i.e. they can see four primary colours. The trait is called tetrachromacy.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
What are they trying to appeal to? Birds? Reptiles?
Because if we can see the yellow pixels, it only means it’s even harder to get the colors right.
And if they want to do intermediate colors (colors triggering more than one rod), at least make them complementary colors for all 3 types or something balanced that makes sense.
Oh and: Fuck it, we’re going to five! ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
My Mitsubishi DLP TV (WD65734) uses a 6-color wheel, adding yellow, magenta and cyan sub-primaries to the typical RGB + clear. Granted, Sharp's addition of Yellow is a first for LCD TVs, but it's old hat for some DLP engined systems.
This addition is supposed to create "truer" color rendition.
$ man woman *
-bash:
The yellow pixels won't help a bit without monster cables and directional ethernet wiring with arrows to show the electrons which way to go.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Saying that the current cameras and monitors are three color is only partly relevant - expanding that to the assumption that cameras and monitors use the SAME three colors is not a true statement. Some devices use color filters and others use colored phosphors or LEDs or even plasma tubes.
This is how devices are said to have a color gamut - any (necessarily) different set of three colors will not be able to reproduce all possible colors. Now, when your camera and monitor have different color gamuts, the result is that you'll only be able to see the colors that are present in both of those gamuts. This has a lot to do with why people see HDTV as having better color than their old CRT set. The monitors have different color gamuts and the HDTV panel can display colors that the CRT can not. The reverse is true, too - while you're loving your new HDTV keep an eye out for a brilliant yellow / green color; a bright lime green. Can't find it? Now you know why.
Could adding a fourth color to the display improve color reproduction? It would increase the color gamut of the display and if that increased gamut covered more of the gamut of the source camera then yes, it would improve the color. There's no simple yes or no answer here: it depends on the camera's capabilities and those are both variable and unknown to the end user.
Color on RGB monitors currently is a fine match for standard broadcast/HDTV/Blu Ray gamut, and LCD monitors are plenty bright, this really doesn't solve a problem anyone was actually having.
Sharp has among the worse LCD tech(IMO) with weak (grey) blacks and a lot of viewing angle shift.
The first reviews that I read, say these problems persist, so Sharp didn't work on real (hard) they have with their technology. Instead they decided to tackle something they can use as a marketing differentiator to impress the rubes.
I thought Sony or someone had made a line of CRTs back in the 1980's or '90s that had quad-color pixels What's the big deal about doing the same thing on a flat panel?
We are the 198 proof..
As someone who (more or less) worked on similar technology, let me give a very quick technical overview:
Regular RGB displays are limited in their color gamut - that is, the range of colors they're able to reproduce. If you look at an RGB color gamut in an xy chromaticity graph (CIE 1931), it appears as a triangle - meaning that no matter what you assign your primary colors (RGB) to be, you'll never be able to cover the entire "horseshoe" shape.
Another thing you will not see in the graph is the 3D coverage (in this case, brightness). In most display devices there's a tradeoff between saturation and brightness. The more saturated you make your primary colors (pushing the corners of the triangle towards the edges and enlarging your gamut), the less brightness you get from the device.
In a filtered system like LCD it's easy to explain - if you make your RGB primaries more saturated, that means the band-pass filter is narrower and transmits less light - and therefore, your white (which is the combination of all three) will be less bright.
The trick here is to use additional primaries (in this case, a fourth yellow) to extend the gamut, without sacrificing brightness. All the primaries will have to carefully selected (depending on the spectrum of the backlight) as to give the maximum brightness in the required white point. In this case, for example, energy from the backlight in the yellow spectrum, which in RGB system would be normally blocked, is allowed to be used to enhance the brightness AND saturation.
This gives rise to different problems - how do I map the source material to the new gamut? While the source material sometimes covers colors beyond Rec. 709 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._709), they're usually getting clipped in the process. This can be handled by sophisticated mapping algorithms which can decide when and how a color should be mapped, thus sacrificing accurate color reproduction (which actually doesn't reproduce the original saturated colors beyond Rec. 709) with a more saturated and appealing image. Depending on the image, the difference is sometimes very evident.
In the long run, I imagine we'll move to a different color system which will enable us to cover the entire color spectrum - however, this will probably take a lot of time, as the whole production chain (cameras, processing, transmission and display) will have to be modified to support the new color space.
So, if we use sensors in three wavelengths to sense colours, why should we require four colour producing devices?? It's just hype.
*** Don't be dull.***
you insensitive clod!
I'd much earger see an increase in transmission bit-rates, such that macro-blocking on quick moves disappears - at the moment (In the UK) this is an exercise in turd-polishing
Didn't Quasar try this in the '70s? The Quasar Quadracolor with the Quintrix or something like that?
I'm sure he thanks his lucky stars for that.
I can hear Sony's response now... "Fuck everything, we're doing five pixels."
(Although if you REALLY wanted to extend the joke, it'd be six pixels.)
I'd be interested in seeing one of these. I have a slighty insensitivity to red light, which makes it very difficult to tell light green from yellow on an RGB screen. No problems in real life, so the reproduction on the screen obviously isn't perfect. Having an actual yellow pixel may indeed be a vast improvement from my point of view.
Sony actually developed a CCD for their digital cameras that added turquoise as a fourth colour. I think they called it RGBC (C for cyan). However, they've only been used in one or two cameras to date.
I imagine, though, any colour that is somewhat orthogonal to the basic RGB coordinates is going to be able to expand the colour gamut quite a bit.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
It says right in the commercial that you have to see the TV in person specifically because a regular TV can't do it justice.
120Hz displays will, by default, interpolate between existing frames with some pretty advanced algorithms. This actually does produce a picture that is smoother in the appearance of motion than the original. It's somewhat spooky when you first see it. It really does quite a good job. Works on any kind of source too.
If you want to see something like it on your computer you can get Cyberlink PowerDVD. It has a TrueTheater Motion setting, which is a funny name given that it looks much better than theater, which does the same kind of thing. Results are very impressive overall.
It is in no way a gimmick or the like, it really works well. Now you may not like the effect, and if you don't the TVs will allow you to shut it down, but it isn't just a half-assed frame-blending technique or something. It does a very good job of smoothing out motion in low FPS video.
In the digital realm at least, cameras have long exceeded the gamut of the displays they go to. Most displays have been sRGB, or close enough, for years. These days some of them are wider gamut, maybe around aRGB or the original NTSC 1931. Still well short of what most cameras can capture.
So, perhaps we try expanding the gamut of displays by adding more colours to them. Even if the source is RGB, doesn't matter, it could be useful if the source has a high gamut. You have to remember you aren't limited to your colour storage mechanism, you can convert. So the camera captures a wide gamut RGB signal. You convert that to a YUV (luminescence, chrominescence, saturation) space in, say, the Pro Photo space. That signal then goes to the TV. It then deals with it how it will to display using its given colours on the screen.
This kind of shit happens all the time already. DVDs are stored in YUV because it allows for chroma sub sampling (you have a lower chroma resolution than luma since the eye is less sensitive) and because that's how analogue signals worked. Your computer converts that to RGB somewhere along the line for your display, could be at the video card, could be in software, whatever. All works perfectly.
Also HDMI is fine. It specifies the ability to have a wider colour gamut as well as more precision for channels.
All in all we aren't dealing with a simple problem, but part of the problem, a large part, is displays having a shitty gamut. Adding more colours may be a cheap way to try and solve that. You can also use more pure primaries, the laser DLPs do that to great result, but also cost $7000.
Our body's visual perceptions are the product of many things ... Here's one that fascinates me, for it suggests that one can 'project blackness' to a screen .. ie, project nothing .. and then see it!
Consider a home movie room, with white walls and a screen for projected HD video (my Optoma H73, old now but wonderful, for example.)
Now, let us view in a semi-darkened room: the walls near the screen are visible, greyish, appearing very similar to the screen before projection of some HD DVD video.
Now, imagine this scene: any normal setting (garden/forest/desert, you name it..) and imagine a fellow in a black trenchcoat entering the scene.
We look, and we are impressed with the 'blackness' .. But wait: we look at the wall near the screen and it is NOT black and is receiving NO direct imagery.. but again, the blackness of the coat is the consequence of the projector blocking ALL video colors from hitting the screen!
The screen image shows deep blackness .. the wall, also not receiving imagery, is not black .. it is still 'grayish white' !
How can that be? ... unless totally psychological 'games' are being played on us by our brain's photon-detector-processing circuitry.
I guess I'll do the next step and use an incident-light meter and measure what's hitting each surface ..
When my life is together enough for me to do that, I'll send results to whoever might email me via the addy below . ... unless one of you really knows the answer!
The contributor here who suggested adding a 'black pixel' made me chuckle .. blackness is already on the TV screen: the spaces between pixels , no?
When/if you write to me, please make the subject be: BLACKNESS:
including the " : " char, and my system will auto-add ya to what ever lil temp mailing list develops.
tkjtkj@gmail.com
"There are 11 kinds of people: those who know binary, those who don't, and those who could not care less!"
Printers use the subtractive color model: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and blacK. It seems that, because TVs use an additive color mechanism, that the missing option from Red, Green, Blue is White. But then perhaps those people complaining about "lack of black" in the images have something to complain about.
"Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get" - Jerry Avins
All Hype, And the volume control doesn't even go to eleven.
... you have to be one of the one-in-a-million people who supposedly happen to be tetrachromates. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy *SCNR*
This one goes up to 11
Sounds like the much hyped over-ventilated commercials on 3 vs. 4 blades, and now 4 vs. 5 blades....
:)
Pretty soon, there will be a commercial for 5 colours and how it's so much clearer than 4 colours!!
A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere. -- Groucho Marx
This reminds me of the ads a company called RCA used to run about the quality of their color TVs. The pictures were indeed sharper and more brilliant, but I was not watching them on an RCA TV! So if the picture could show the quality of their TV, why was the quality of my TV so crappy? It had to be the quality of the shows and not the TV.
My understanding is that the RGB standard is the best compromise for the largest number of viewers. Sure, a fourth channel would probably improve the image for some viewers, but not all viewers. And it's not even clear that the same fourth channel would be the optimal improvement for any large subset of viewers capable of perceiving it.
Why is Slashdot treating my paragraph tags like blockquote tags?
I read that what the yellow pixels do is to allow displaying the same apparent brightness with less power. There are new regulations about power usage for the large displays and this could be their way of meeting the standards. It is more efficient to produce yellows by a yellow pixel than mixing two other colors. Of course marketing will decide to sell this as giving a better picture rather than reducing power.
OTOH, I was reading that they have found that certain people are able to perceive a fourth color beyond RGB. Like color blindness, it is genetic. The article pointed out that the next time you are arguing with someone who insists that two things are different colors that could be the reason. I wonder how they perceive TV based on just RGB.
RGB is confined color space, and adding yellow would greatly improve the accuracy of the display. It would allow the monitor to display CIE L*a*b color. The "L" channel stands for luminance; the "a" channel is green and magenta; and the "b" channel is blue and yellow. Theoretically it covers the entire visual gamut - that is, all that our eyes can see. While it may not be entirely noticeable in a medium like TV, you can bet that photographers will happily buy the monitors.
so if they're adding a 4th pixel, doesn't the total voxel element grow by 33%, meaning the dot pitch grows and resolution drops? assuming of course the whole display dot pitch isn't shrunken to compensate.
Those that work in the theatrical lighting industry are used to using RGB color in LED fixtures. One of the challenges that we face is that using the Red and Green LED's produces weak amber and golden tones out of the entire color spectrum. The addition of the Yellow LED provides the ability to produce the richer tones at full lumen without the degradation that usually occurs from Red and Green color mixing.
actually you are incorrect, having 10bit log, 16 bit or 32 bit float does in fact give you more colour information then just shades in the same range. 8 bit colour is basically the visible spectrum. anything beyond that sometimes does give you more shades in between, it also gives you colour range that exists beyond the visible colour range. so if you need to adjust a colour channel in some way you have extra colour to play with and having a more accurate representation of light when doing composting. like having an 8cm ruler that you can slide 16 cm through or compress into the 8 cm frame, with out clipping your colour the same way when you manipulate your 8 bit colour.
As a digital compositor, it is my opinion that adding a yellow channel to a tv would be like watching VHS on an HD tv. it is not going to improve the original VHS. the change would have to come from the source and be carried all the way to the end product to make a difference.
Yes, I thought it was all hype. The wife picked the TV out of three at Best Buy. I didn't see any difference one way or the other.
Until I got it home and ran Avatar Blu-Ray. It looked incredible, and I already owned a Philips HDTV before.
The real difference is images under sunlight (or simulated sunlight). Those look real enough to touch. Even the old DVDs look better when sunlight scenes are shown.
http://xkcd.com/732/
...what's the point of having four color output if the input is still three colors? If the input isn't in four colors, then this is just a gimmick on par with Creative Labs' "24-bit sound".
Speaking from the audio camp this is similar to how adding a subwoofer or specializing your midranges can improve sound, yet the source remains the same material it once was. Albeit this is an entirely different process, but it is very similar in the way of using a setup of tweeters, mids, midbass, and a subwoofer to achieve a full sound, versus just using the tweeters, mids, midbass or tweeters, mids and subwoofer. It's just further specialization and thought it's effects may be minimal it allows the other color reproduction to become more accurate by removing the burden of that color's reproduction.
" And I laugh at how you are supposed to see the advantages of 4-color technology in ads on your 3-color sets at home as you watch their commercials."
thats why at the end of the commercial they say 'in order to believe it, you need to see it' or some crap like that; its more clever in the commercial.
theyre basically saying you need to see the tv in person.