A Billion-Color Display

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.

Yes, but...

how am I supposed to see how good this display is if they don't show me a picture of it?

side bar topic:

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:To what end?

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?

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,...

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.

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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

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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 v

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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 time

Come back after you've turned off anti-aliasing.

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.

Re:Come back after you've turned off 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

Re:Come back after you've turned off anti-aliasing

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?

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.

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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

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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 th

Re:To what end?

Also, "well the old one is all people should need" is never an excuse to stop innovating.

Yes, you should have your eyeballs upgaded immediately!

Re:To what end?

I did, with clear plastic add-ons. I've got a friend who went with the laser upgrade.

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And you see more colors now?

Re:To what end?

Nope, just higher resolution.

Re:To what end?

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?

To see billions of colors at the same time one only needs LSD technology...

Re:Great

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.)

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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 h

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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

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.. 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

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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"