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A Billion-Color Display

Posted by kdawson on Sat May 10, 2008 04:24 PM
from the i-can-see-clearly-now dept.
Displays Graphics Software
The Future of Things covered the introduction last month of HP's DreamColor display, with 30 bits/pixel, developed in conjunction with DreamWorks Animation. The display is aimed at the video production, animation, and graphic arts industries. HP promises blacker blacks and whiter whites — though TFoT quotes one source who notes that if they deliver this, it will be due to the back-lighting and not to the number of bits/pixel. No word on the size of the displays that will actually be delivered, or on the price.
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[+] HP Introduces First-Ever 30-bit, 1 Billion Color Display 236 comments
justechn writes "I recently had the opportunity to see, first hand, HP's new 30-bit, 1 billion color LCD display. I have to say I am impressed. Not only is the HP Dreamcolor LP2480zx capable of displaying so much more than standard LCDs, but it considered a Color Critical display. This means if you work with videos or photos you can be guaranteed that what you see is what it is supposed to look like. With 6 built-in color spaces (NTSC, SMPTE, sRGB, Rec. 709, Adobe RGB and DCI), you can easily switch to the one that best suits your applications and process. At $3,499, it is too expensive to be a consumer level LCD, but compared to other Color Critical displays (which can cost as much as $15,000 and $25,000) this is a real bargain. This display was a joint venture between HP and DreamWorks animation. When I talked to the executives of DreamWorks, they were very excited about this display because it solved a huge problem for them."
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  • Is it really possible to improve screens further, in a way that's visible to the naked eye? It's the same with high end audio system. I sure can't tell the difference between a mid price-range audio system and a bleeding edge $50,000 system.

    My point is that 24 bpp ought to be enough for anyone.

    • Re:To what end? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gEvil (beta) (945888) on Saturday May 10 2008, @04:41PM (#23364220)
      And yet that 24bpp can't reproduce the full range of colors that can be printed on a piece of paper. And the ink on that piece of paper can't reproduce the full range of colors visible to the naked eye. Yes, there's room for a whole lot of improvement. That's not to discount the progress we've already made (24bpp is pretty impressive), but there's still a long way to go.

      • Re:To what end? (Score:5, Informative)

        by moosesocks (264553) on Saturday May 10 2008, @05:22PM (#23364518) Homepage
        Modern monitors use an additive method of color blending, while printers (by their very nature) must use subtractive blending.

        The range of colors that can be reproduced by a 24-bit RGB device is always going to be different from the range of colors that a 24-bit CMY device can reproduce.

        By the same note, a 24-bit RGB display can produce colors that the CMY printer cannot.

        One color space isn't bigger than the other; they're simply different. Once you increase the bit-depth far enough to encompass the full spectrum of visible light for both color spaces, the distinction can finally be dropped.

        • Mod parent (or his sibling) up... however,... (Score:5, Informative)

          by Animaether (411575) on Saturday May 10 2008, @05:43PM (#23364648) Journal
          They're absolutely right that CMYK does not encompass RGB. They overlap for a large part, and don't overlap in small areas (with one larger area in the deep vivid cyans).

          However, a larger bitdepth doesn't do anything for color space. It simply determines the granularity of that color space. If with 16 bit you get 65,536 individual colors within the RGB gamut (with slightly higher granularity in the green channel, typically), and with 24bit you get 16,777,216 individual possible colors within the RGB gamut, then with 30 bit (10 bit per channel; it's not new, really), you get 1,073,741,824 individual possible colors... but still within the RGB gamut (of the device at hand).

          An HDR display (either by using a very bright backlight or more localized LED backlights control, etc.) also doesn't change the gamut of that device - it simply allows for much brighter values of them.

          Now, if they were to make an LCD panel that aside from the R,G,B pixel elements also had C M Y pixel elements, then you most certainly could increase the gamut. It would also be much more difficult to switch to than a simple bitdepth change.

          • Now, if they were to make an LCD panel that aside from the R,G,B pixel elements also had C M Y pixel elements, then you most certainly could increase the gamut. It would also be much more difficult to switch to than a simple bitdepth change.

            That would make no sense on an LCD display, given that CMY is a subtractive color model, whilst color is achieved on LCDs via additive blending.

            Although adding another "primary" color should increase your gamut, CMY might not be the best choice of colors to use in that case.

            Think of RGB mixing is analogous to shining three different-colored flashlights at a white target, the complete overlap [wikipedia.org] of which should also be white.

            CMY color mixing is analogous to taking three different colored sheets of glass, and l

      • It take HP 30 bits to show color? Ha! my old Apple II could do it in just 8 bits. HP has a lot of catching up to do.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by RalphBNumbers (655475)
        Afaik, the fact that a 24bbp display can't reproduce all visible colors has more to do with the fact that the display's pixels are made up of 3 monochromatic sub-pixels than the fact that there are 8-bits of information for each of those sub-pixels. Just adding 2 extra bits for each of those 3 colors isn't going to do much in terms of spectrum coverage iirc.

        I'd actually be interested in seeing research into displays that didn't use distinct pixels at all, and instead went with something like a bayer patter

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by RalphBNumbers (655475)
            You're almost right... which is to say, wrong.
            There are 3 types of cone receptors, and 3 numbers is sufficient to describe any color the human eye can perceive, but those 3 numbers can not represent actual physical colors.

            Your cones do not just detect one monochromatic color, each type has it's own response curve across varying frequencies, and they're not even nice simple bell curves (one even has two peaks). To represent the entire visible color space with 3 numbers, as the CIE 1931 XYZ color space does [wikipedia.org],

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by somersault (912633)
          Reminds me of one of the couple of times I went scuba diving in the sea. I don't think I've ever seen colours so bright as some of the plants on the bottom of the sea bed that day (and this was on a dull stormy day in west-coast Scotland, which is hardly very exotic!). When you take stuff like stones and weeds out of the water suddenly they look very dull.. I wonder what the difference is.. maybe something to do with the refraction of the light going from the water to the glass to air into my eyeballs uppin

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by smallfries (601545)
      There are two main ways to improve over a standard system and the summary sounds as if they've done both. The contrast range on a normal screen is in the order of 500:1. On a bright sunny day outdoors our eyes pick up contrast ratios that are 1000s of times larger. The claim about blacker blacks and whiter whites will be a reference to High Dynamic Range.

      Once you increase the range of colours that you are going to display it means the gaps between distinct colours become larger and so more bits are required
      • Not in 30 bits they haven't. That's only 10 bits per channel (compared to 8 in a regular screen). There's a reason you don't see 10 bit floating point numbers much.

    • Come back after you've turned off anti-aliasing. (Score:5, Informative)

      by nobodyman (90587) on Saturday May 10 2008, @05:10PM (#23364416)

      Is it really possible to improve screens further, in a way that's visible to the naked eye?
      I think so. As a quick example of why I think this, temporarily turn off anti-aliasing in your OS. The characters on the screen should look pretty crappy relative to a book or an illustration. So, I think we have a ways to go. I think the same is true for color depth, it's just hard to recognize it because we have gotten used to 8 bits/pixel.

      Most new displays have a resolution of 96dpi, whereas low-end printers can easily pull off 300dpi. Same goes for color-depth. Black and White screen images at 8 bits/pixel simply cant match the range of black&white print & film.

      When you think about it, techniques such as anti-aliasing are really just hacks to work around the limitations of today's monitors. If monitors could pull off 300dpi, you wouldn't need anti-aliasing.
      • Displays can already do a much higher DPI - some handhelds with 3" screens can do 800x600. That's 2.4" along the length, for 800dots/2.4" = 333.33333etc. DPI.

        However, imagine a full size 17" widescreen (16:10) at a DPI of 300. 17" is about 14.4" wide by 9" high. 14.4*300 = 4320, 9*300 = 2700. A 4320x2700 display? Crikey. I'm sure we'll get there eventually, but at the resolution rate we're currently seeing - not for some time aside from high end displays.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Jeff DeMaagd (2015)
        There are different forms of antialiasing. The ClearType used by Windows really gets me. Yes, it does make the shapes smother, but what it does is turn the edges into rainbows. Instead of the right edge of a shape being a consistent color, and the left edge of a shape being a consistent color, it could be any of three colors anywhere. But it is the sharpest form of antialiasing for text.

        • Re:Come back after you've turned off anti-aliasing (Score:4, Informative)

          by phasm42 (588479) on Saturday May 10 2008, @09:01PM (#23365932)

          The ClearType used by Windows really gets me. Yes, it does make the shapes smother, but what it does is turn the edges into rainbows.
          This may be due to your monitor not being specified correctly. IIRC, there are two main types of LCD panels: RGB and BGR (different color orders), and in order for ClearType to work correctly, it has to know which one you're using. I've noticed if someone does a non-lossy screen capture of some ClearType text on a computer set up for the opposite sub-pixel color order than what I use, the text looks crappy and has that rainbow effect.

    • Re:To what end? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Divebus (860563) on Saturday May 10 2008, @05:11PM (#23364428)

      Is it really possible to improve screens further, in a way that's visible to the naked eye?

      Just as in audio where quantizing becomes a problem only in very low level passages, fine greyscale, especially in the blackest image areas, will benefit from more bits/pixel.

      For example, an ordinary CD (16 bits) can sound rather gritty on quiet recordings such as the low level passages of classical music. That's because you're probably only using two or three bits of sample depth down there. To combat the issue, 24 bit audio will elevate the sample depth everywhere but will show itself best at low levels. Dither (essentially noise) is used to randomize and mask the problem, but that's a cheat.

      In video, fine greyscale performance comes from higher bit depth per pixel and is visible throughout the entire luminance range. The issue shows itself on flat (un-textured) areas with minute lighting changes across the surface, like a softly lit painted wall. You'll see annular rings on the surface as the bit values step through their range. Again, dither may be used to randomize the quantized transitions.

      24 bit video is really 8 bits per primary color - so it's not that good to start with. In professional application, it's not unusual to work with 10 bit [per channel] or even up to 16 bit[per channel] images, mostly to be more friendly to post production.

      Fortunately, analog humans are fairly blind to minute color changes. Unfortunately, our system of digital video happily shows you everything wrong with it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by moosesocks (264553)
      Although today's monitors are fairly good at color reproduction, they could easily benefit from extra dynamic range, which LCDs have never been particularly good at. Although the article lacks technical depth, it can be inferred that the extra 6 bits will be used as an alpha channel, to adjust the brightness of each pixel, which should comfortably solve the dynamic range problem once and for all if it works.

      Similarly, in the visual arts industry, it is absolutely necessary for an image on the screen to loo

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by davolfman (1245316)
      I'd just be happy if the manufacturers told me the panel technology in the specs so I could avoid 6-bit TN displays.

      As it is, 10 bit displays are nothing new. Photographers have been swearing by them for years as they allow for the response curve of the display to be corrected without dipping below 256 displayable tones per channel. Of course the real solution is just to get someone to manufacture CRTs again. For this kind of market an analog display technology has a serious advantage in that there ar
    • How many shades of gray can that 24 bit display show? Hint - the answer is 254.
    • Not really. I've seen some 12-bit grayscale monitors. They used to buy them for the radiologists. Most of the radiologists now use regular (good quality, but still 24-bpp) LCDs. The contrast ratio on a monitor is MUCH more important. Contrast ratio expands the colour gamut while increased bit depth just lets you move through your existing gamut in smaller steps.
    • The first is to improve grey scale. Your eyes are extremely sensitive to changes in luminescence. As such we can see grey scale gradients with great precision. 256 levels (which is what 8 bits per channel gets you) just isn't enough. There are already grayscale medical displays out that do 1024 greys (10-bit).

      Then of course there's the problem of wider gamut and wider dynamic range displays. Right now most displays show a fairly small subset of the total amount of colours humans can perceive, and also have

      • If you're doing graphics, you often have to make edits on tiny things that aren't perceptually different unless you're zoomed really far in but have an impact on things as a whole.

        Yeah, but you don't need these displayed. Having the in-memory image have a better resolution or a better color depth is a good idea, but I would leave showing the details for when you actually zoom it in.

        Accurately showing red as red and blue as blue is an entirely different story, not related to bit depth.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by sjames (1099)

        No amount of zooming will make your eyes capable of telling the difference between 30 and 24 bit/pixel color.

        • Re:To what end? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by evanbd (210358) on Saturday May 10 2008, @11:45PM (#23366742)

          On the contrary. Go create a single-color or grayscale smooth one-dimensional gradient on a large-ish image (1024x1024 or so). It will show clear evidence of banding at 8 bits per channel, since there are only 256 color levels available.

          This will be substantially reduced if everything were properly dithered, but in normal software and normal displays it is not.

          How worth it is I don't know, but there is absolutely an easily detectable difference. How about testing your hypothesis before claiming you know what you're talking about, hmm? It's not exactly a difficult experiment to carry out.

        • Re:To what end? (Score:4, Funny)

          by JamesP (688957) on Sunday May 11 2008, @08:38AM (#23368628)
          To see billions of colors at the same time one only needs LSD technology...

        • Human brightness sensitivity is not even close to constant across the total range of brightness we can perceive. It varies widely over the range of colours we can see, and from person to person. Scene composition affects it, too: the shape of an object in relation to nearby objects changes our perception of its brightness. You have to consider lateral inhibition, limited integration capability, the optical modulation function of the eye, and orientation and temporal filtering, not to mention the various
  • Well, tech such as this will bring our holodeck dreams just that bit closer.

    Also I can see where tech such as this can be implemented in the medical field, as a for-instance.

  • I was hoping for something like ScRGB support. I've always wanted two things out of displays: higher DPI, and higher gamut. Does this deliver either?

    Chris Chinnock, President of the research firm "Insight Media", is one of those who are skeptical about HP's claims. He says that while the 30-bit resolution will allow for better gradation between the color levels, the technology will not be able to increase the color gamut of a display.

    Guess not. Oh well.

  • Yes, but... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Bradmont (513167) on Saturday May 10 2008, @04:57PM (#23364324)
    how am I supposed to see how good this display is if they don't show me a picture of it?
  • ...in which people are shown the a series of images on two of these displays, side by side... with copies of each image in the series being presented on each display, one rendered with a full 30 bits and the other with rendering reduced to 24 bits... and with the 30-bit image being randomly assigned to the left or right.

    I'd like to see whether people can actually identify the 30-bit image at a rate significantly greater than chance... or whether they're just doing it because they can.

    Like the "Eight-transis
    • (I meant to say... yes, I used Preview but I didn't look at it...) ...in which people are shown a series of images on a matched pair of these displays, placed side by side... with copies of each image in the series being presented on each display, one rendered with a full 30 bits and the other with rendering reduced to 24 bits... and with the 30-bit image being randomly assigned to the left or right.

      I'd like to see whether people can actually identify the 30-bit image at a rate significantly greater than ch

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by icegreentea (974342)
      Get a 1024 pixel high/wide image. And then make a perfect white-black gradient. You should be able to tell between the two. As someone else pointed out, you only have 256 greys, so you end up with one grey forming a 4 pixel band (which is noticeable). The new displace will have one grey per pixel.. much harder to tell.
  • Normal RGB displays do not span the colorspace the eye can see. Just like good printer need more than 3 color ink to make good photograps, good display need more than Red, Green and Blue dots to span the whole colorspace of the eye. No matter how many bits you put behind each color, you can not improve this fact.

    Brief explanation:
    RGB colors are designed to match the human eyes sensitivity for the three primary colors. Each color cones spectral sensitivity partly overlaps the others. The RGB display therefo
  • Besides reqular light, I want my screen to radiate X-rays, Gamma-rays and infrared light, and also ordinary radio waves and even more kinds of waves.
    I want it to emit quarks, neutrons and positrons, and perhaps god particles.
    The constrast of todays screens is appalling, I want miniature black holes creating perfect black tones. I wouldn't know how to create perfect white tones though.

    Yes, I am serious!
    • You can get a few of those if you just find a really old CRT. The ones that inspired your mother to warn you not to sit too close to the TV.
  • while a billion colors is obviously ridiculous, there are people who can see 100x more colors than an average person

    scientists have recently identified a very small, very rare population of women who see in 4 colors, to a total of 100 million colors

    most humans see in 3 colors, about 1 million colors: red, green, and blue. a tetrachromat has an extra cone type between red and green, around orange. it's only women because the mutation requires two x chromosomes to work

    read all about it, they describe a women who can look into a river and make out silting and depth levels a normal human can't, x-men mutant indeed!:

    http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06256/721190-114.stm [post-gazette.com]

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy [wikipedia.org]

    • Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)

      by $random_var (919061) on Saturday May 10 2008, @05:10PM (#23364422)
      I know you're jesting, but our eyes are definitely capable of appreciating 30 bits, and many megapixels as well. Our eyes don't work like cameras; we're excellent at discriminating fine differences within the area we're looking at. We might not be able to tell #cc1111 from #cd1111 in isolation, but if they're right next to each other we can see that difference and more.

      (On a similar note, in the center of our visual field, we can discriminate physical positions with much greater accuracy than the receptor density would lead one to believe, because our analog receptors are capable of discerning fine differences by working with their neighboring receptors. So anybody who says "X resolution is higher than humans can see" is talking out of his ass. You can tell when they know what they're talking about when they say something like "at this resolution, most humans will only be able to perceive a 1-pixel difference 60% of the time" or something which sounds a lot more like signal theory than somebody comparing one arbitrary number to another arbitrary number.)
      • The way you test resolving ability is to get the optical device (eye or camera) to resolve something. The simplest test is to determine whether two dots are separate or not. Your optometrist does something similar every time she asks you to read the eye chart.

        You can certainly determine the resolving power of a normal eye. No matter what the sensor is doing, the resolving power is fundamentally limited by the lens in front of it. You need two numbers though: separation (dots per inch) and distance to th

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by icegreentea (974342)
          I think the grandparent was talking about color resolution not angular/optical (or is it something else?) resolution. There is no arguing that human eyes are fundamentally limited by our lenses, and that gives us a pretty much fixed benchmark for maximal human sight in one measure. But when it comes to distinguishing colors, human vision is far less concrete. The fact that we have an auto adjusting white balance should be enough proof of that.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mccalli (323026)
      .. video codecs used in consumer video systems (even H.264/Blu-Ray) do not have such high color depth. So what's the point?

      And of course, video codecs have been perfected now and will never, ever change or improve. You're right - we should all just pack up and go home, it's all been done.

      Cheers,
      Ian
      • Heck, if anything, those codecs should focus on higher quality output first; higher compression be damned. I hate seeing the blocky artifacts from any non-lossless video compression. I don't mind that they're only 8bpc, video and film noise tends to kill any banding issues anyway.. until they don't anymore, I won't worry about 10bpc, 16bpc or even 32bpc video encoding.

        However... this is in collaboration with DreamWorks. This isn't about your typical DVD or Blu-Ray disc. This is about displaying things l
        • Err. 24-bit displays aren't nearly as rare as you think. I'm sure they were, though, 10 years ago when that SGI display was still revolutionary...
          • Again, I think you are wrong. There was a big stir just a few months ago about Apple displays being 18 bit. I think most LCD panels sold for PCs are still 18 bit panels, which is why you'll find it incredibly hard to get a simple, blunt "24 bits per pixel" mentioned on the box, or the company's website. But you'll get a gigantic "2ms response" sticker on the box. At best, you'll get something like "16 million colors" which means 18 bit, and 16.7 million colors when it's a true 24 bpp display.

            Again, read t [wikipedia.org]

      • Can just change your threshold for comments to browse at 0 or above. Personally I browse at -1, but just stop reading when I recognise the sentence (that "let yOUR conscient be yOUR guide!" guy is annoying too :P )

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