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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.
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.
I enjoy the irony of the post -- there are two questions posted in the summary -- "is it hype" and "is it real." Answering no to both is perhaps appropriate to point out something along the lines of "it doesn't matter."
But I think a better single answer to both questions is "yes." That is, yes -- adding the pixel changes things. But yes, it is hype (in the sense that the difference isn't meaningful.)
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?
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"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?
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.
When you say "Just click here" it's customary to include a link to click on.
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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.
... 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
here
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!
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...
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?
What you just said might as well have been doublespeak. It says nothing at all. Why bother?
Right?
/obscure? Hopefully not for the /. crowd...
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
They look an awful lot like /.
seems they are having an identical argument over it also... How odd.
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.
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?
Is it really a big news story that an advertisement for consumer electronics contains hype? That a company would give some fancy name to a minor technical feature and then try to advertise it as a huge advance?
In other news, Axe Body Spray doesn't really make girls want to have sex with you.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Well, maybe not human females, but... to be sure, I'd stay away from the zoo after using it.
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.
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.
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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
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.
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.
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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?
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 ]
As opposed to outlanders who can't see the difference because their TV is full of corn.
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.
it made your mom have sex with me.
Morpheus, God of Dreams.
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").
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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.
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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!
So did $5.......what's your point?
zosxavius photography
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..
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!
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.)
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.
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.
Wow - it's impressive how little you know about color theory and still make wild claims. And your reading/interpretation skills certainly aren't too good either.
Your signature is very apt I guess, so there is little point in going on.
If you really want to know where you're wrong, our eyes use three distinct "color sensors", each responding to different (but overlapping) parts of the visible spectrum. furthermore, intensity (brightness) is not relevant when talking about the visible spectrum. Your whole point about there being 8 major points in the light spectrum is utter hogwash.
The link in GP is much more relevant to this discussion and you should try reading it.
I'm not about to go into a flame war here with someone of your "knowledge" of the color theory and reading/interpretation skills.
I will just leave you with a question (or two) someone as "knowledgeable" as you should easily answer to himself:
Are our TV and computer screens made in the same way as our organic eyes, and if they are - how come no two screens look the same to us?
Do our screens reproduce the colors in exactly the same way our eyes perceive them?
Answering those correctly, you MIGHT be onto where I was talking about colors in the post above, and where I was referring to the way monitors and TVs are reproducing them.
As for brightness not being relevant... Did you ever hear about backlight?
It is kinda like a "fourth pixel" in itself - only a really big one.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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!"
It is true that output devices produce colors differently than how human eyes "read" them. Hence, as you point out, different output devices translate differently from one format to the other and achieve differing results (not sure this is a completely valid metaphor).
It is precisely therefore that it makes no sense to speak in terms of 8 points on a light spectrum. That kind of terminology contains no useful way to translate into how our eyes work and hence how they will perceive something. When talking about producing a specific "seen color" you have to make the way the eye works your reference, not the way your color simulation works.
For example, you are correctly stating that magenta is a color that is currently not very well expressed by typical screens. According to your thinking, you just add an magenta pixel and whoop-de-doo everything is fine. However, since the three kinds of cones respond to overlapping parts of the visible spectrum and there is no specific magenta cone, this may well influence them differently than you wanted, which you have to compensate for with your other three pixels. Therefore your "we just add another kind of pixel" thinking is too simplistic. And therefore it does not make sense to simply think in terms of the colors we observer, but you have to think in terms of how our eyes work.
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?
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.
it's not that they're trying to display more information than is already there, they're just trying to produce a more accurate representation of the signal, for more clarification, try comparing a crt screen's colour rendition to any lcd, the lcd has nothing like the colour depth!
As opposed to cocksuckers who don't care because their hard drive is full of porn.
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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.
...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".