Palm Offers Refund to m130 Owners

EyesWideOpen writes "On Wednesday Palm began notifying registered m130 owners "that they were entitled to a full refund, including taxes paid on the PDA" for misleading them about the actual number of colors the product supports. The m130 was originally advertised as supporting 65,536 colors when in actuality it can only display 58,621. Owners who choose to forfeit the refund and keep the PDA could instead download a free version of the video game SimCity." Looks like a great deal for those who don't care about the bit depth of their PDA, and a way out for those who do.

Re:Woo Classic Maxis!

[questionlp]

There is always Bejeweled/Diamond Mines :)

That game is definitely a productivity virus... even more so than Solitaire (Minesweeper, Hearts, etc.).

Re:is this really a big deal?

[Target Drone]

Would you return your pda because it only displays 58000 colours instead of 65000?

Would you return your Pentium because it does almost all divisions correctly?

Like the Pentium bug this isn't a cases of whether users will notice a difference. It's about a company owning up to its mistakes.

Re:But I've already got a PortaPam!

[0ptimus]

I've got an idea! Why don't you just chalk up the whopping large registration fee and buy the program!? Wow, that's a novel thought.

Re:Hey

[RedWizzard]

Well if you want to redefine the definition of pixel, then fine. A CRT driven at 32bit color can manage only 768 colors measured at the subpixel level. And Palm's M130 can only manage 48 and not the 128 they claimed. Which is the point - they lied about the color capabilities and now they're still distorting the truth so they don't look quite so bad. Offering refunds for 58K colors instead of 65K sounds like Palm are great. Refunds for 4K colors instead of 65K sounds justified, nothing more.

Re:I'm feeling some hostility here

[topham]

The 12bit colour isn't a PALLET of 16.7 million (or 65K) with only 4096 displayed at a time.

It's only 4096 colours total. You don't get to choose which colours are in the pallet.

You get 16 shades of red, 16 shades of green and 16 shades of blue. You get to mix them as well, but thats it.

So, yeah, even though there are only 25,600 pixels on the screen you could still display an image, via scrolling with the full 65K colours. Now your left we fudge tricks to get the same colour range.

I think this move by Palm is a good move though.
Many people are probably more than happy with the display.

58,621 colors?

[Alsee]

If they want to say it has 58,621 colors then they have to say the screen isn't 160x160 anymore, it's 80x160 or 80x80. The only way to get the 58,621 colors is by DITHERING which kills your resolution.

-

You left out the time-domain part

[GlenRaphael]

If you have a 1 bit display (just black and white), if you make every other pixel black, and every other pixel white, it will give the appearance of being gray (especially at higher resolutions). That is what dithering is. This is opposed to showing a pixel that is actually gray (half black half white, that is, each sub pixel [red, blue, green] on equal intensity, at half intensity).

So far so good. But suppose you generate TWO complementary frames of dithered 50% grey. In one frame the first pixel is white, in the other it is black. If "O" is white and "X" is black your two frames look like this:

FRAME #1:
OXOX
XOXO
OXOX

FRAME #2:
XOXO
OXOX
XOXO

Now, alternate displaying frames #1 and #2 in rapid succession on an LCD display with a slow decay rate. The resulting image looks like this:

COMBINED FRAME:
****
****
****

Where "*" looks like a pixel that is 50% grey. Not dithered grey, real grey.

Re:Hey

[Webmonger]

In the first place, CRTs are analog, so they aren't limited in the number of colours they display. Or rather, they are limited, but only if you start counting each individual electron. That's right: a CRT can display far more than 16.7M colours using only, say, its green electron gun.

The 256-bit-per-channel limitation you describe is in the video adapter hardware, not in the monitor. And video adapters address pixels, not subpixels.

CRTs don't even have subpixels, because subpixels are addressable, and the red/green/blue subcomponents of CRT display (phosphor dots) are not addressable.

So the monitor supports an infinite number of colours. The video card supports 16.7M colours per pixel.

Yes, there is colour mixing going on. No one wants to see 16.7M shades of spectral green. Shove a magnifying glass up against your monitor, and you'll see those red, blue and green phosphor dots.

But the same thing happens with colour photographs, and printing, and pretty well anything that uses a pigment to produce different shades of colour. Everyone agrees that when the mixing below addressable resolution, it's called "a colour", and when mixing at addresable resolution, it's called "a dither pattern".

I have no problem with Palm's original mistake. They happen. But Palm's way of dealing with it has been absolutely atrocious. If they had originally advertised the device as supporting 937,936 colours, they might be justified in claiming its true colour depth was 58,621.

But no one advertises a 16-bit display as supporting 937,936 colours, because it's nonsense. The only reason Palm cares about these "colour mixing" numbers is because Palm's trying to spin this as a 10% reduction in colour depth, instead of a 94% reduction.

That's the "real problem", IMHO.