New 20" iMac Screens Show 98% Fewer Colors

Trintech points us to an AppleInsider article about another class-action lawsuit directed against Apple Inc. This one claims that the displays on new 20" iMacs are only capable of 6-bit-per-pixel color, 98% fewer colors than Apple advertises. Rather than the 8-bit, in-plane switching (IPS) screens used in 24" iMacs and earlier 20" models, "[t]he new 20-inch iMac features a 6-bit twisted nematic film (TN) LCD screen," according to the article, "which the [law] firm claims is the 'least expensive of its type,' sporting a narrower viewing angle than the display of the 24-inch model, less color depth, less color accuracy, and greater susceptibility to washout." Apple recently settled a very similar class-action suit about the displays on MacBook and MacBook Pro models.

How can you judge colour quality?

[Ed Avis]

I don't have a Mac, but I do sometimes buy computer monitors. I can understand specifications like the physical size, resolution, viewing angle and (just about) contrast ratio. But do manufacturers publish specs on what colour depth is supported? Is there some quantitative measure of how well a display shows different colours and how wide the gamut is? How can I avoid getting caught out like these hapless iMac buyers?

Class Action?

[randyest]

Strange, the first case that was "settled out of court under undisclosed terms" seems to have been just two guys. Surely there are more than two photographers who bought macs thinking they would get 8-bit color and later realized it was only 6-bit. I wonder why no class-action was initiated? Since it wasn't though, it seems like Apple is still open to potentially thousands or more lawsuits for this false advertising.

That's what it is, right? They say "millions of colors" when it's really 262k colors. Or is there some precedent that lets a company claim dithering = unique color?

Can't say I'm surprised.

[DurendalMac]

I work at an Apple shop, I love Apple products, but I'd be happy to tell you how shitty the 20" Aluminum iMac screens are. They really, really suck, and here's hoping Apple finally gets their head out of their ass and puts a quality screen on what should be a quality product.

Re:No April Fools articles this year.

[electrictroy]

Thanks for the clarification. I was sitting here and thinking to myself, "That can't bee right. 6-bits of color is how much my RGB Amiga 500 used in 1987 (64 colors)."

So it's 6 bits per color (red, green, or blue) to achieve 18 bits total (thousands of colors). Versus a "real" monitor that can do 24 bits total, aka millions of colors.

Yeah. Definitely false advertising.
Lousy Apple.
Starting to act like Microscrew.

Re:No April Fools articles this year.

[gEvil (beta)]

I have a 6-bit LG monitor that I picked up on clearance a few years ago and I have to say that it does an excellent job of dithering. The viewing angles aren't that great, but as far as color goes, it's really not too bad. It's hard to tell even with some of the gradient tests that are out there. OTOH, I've put those same tests up on some of the LCD monitors at work and they look horrible. Point being that there are some 6-bit panels out there that manage to display colors pretty well.

Re:6-bit colors make gradients look awful.

[hattig]

They were thinking "low end consumer all-in-one computer, let's use the cheap, plentiful, TN LCD displays that everyone else uses in their equivalent systems". They might have gone a little too cheap it seems, on the other hand it's been out months without any loud complaints before now.

Mid-range LCD panels can only do 8-bits per component as well. 10-bit panels - they must exist, but they're rare and presumably quite high end.

There's no desire from the manufacturers to improve quality, they seem to love selling TN displays. They're good for gamers and fast video though - very fast response times.

Is this really newsworthy?

[dHagger]

So Apple uses a TN panel for one of their consumer products. Just like it is used in a majority of all consumer-grade flat-screens on the market. Sure, it is a bit misleading stating "it's going to look stunning on an iMac", but TN is in my opinion a logical choice of panel for a product like the iMac. That makes the rant about all the ways TN is inferior to IPS feel a bit unnecessary.

Re:No April Fools articles this year.

[Firehed]

It may be weird, but it's also remarkably common. About half the LCDs on Newegg are reported as showing 16m or 16.2m colors, rather than 16.7m (2^24). A far cry from the 280k-odd colors of a 6-bit-per-channel display, but the number they're reporting is based off of the results of a 6-bit panel using dithering. Many cheaper screens from all manufacturers follow this trend, especially those advertised towards gamers. They sacrifice color reproduction in order to get the pixels to twist faster - all of the reported 2ms panels are 6-bit dithered displays, which gives awful color reproduction (not critical for games most of the time, but a big problem for photo/video work). Of course, anything faster than 16ms is absolutely pointless since you're dealing with a 60Hz signal, but that's aside the point. More notably, the 6-bit panels are quite a bit cheaper, as one would expect.

I'm almost positive that my Macbook Pro does this as well; honestly, quite unacceptable for a "pro" machine. It's especially noticeable at the brighter edge of a gradient (ex. the Photoshop color palette).

Most people aren't going to really notice. Dithering is reasonably effective, and it still manages to give the illusion of most of the spectrum (certainly far more than 6-bit/64 levels per channel, rather than 8-bit/256). But at the end of the day it's still an illusion, and the difference IS there.

Re:No April Fools articles this year.

[kesuki]

"So it's 6 bits per color (red, green, or blue) to achieve 18 bits total (thousands of colors). Versus a "real" monitor that can do 24 bits total, aka millions of colors. Yeah. Definitely false advertising."

Not really, the apple displays support 'dithering' which allows the creation of millions of colors on a 18-bit display by varying the color shades of nearby pixels, to the human eye, you still see millions of colors, even though the display only has a couple hundred thousand color states.

The problem is that for professionals dithering distorts photo chroma, so it's impossible to use an 18-bit display for professional photography uses, and even when you use it at 'home' for editing normal photos you wind up making them look worse for people who have true, 24-bit displays.

Apple should say upfront if a TFT is using dithering or not, but it's never stopped the likes of dell, or gateway or any other oem from selling 'dithering' displays as 'millions of colors TFT displays.' The reason why apple got caught with their pants down in their lawsuit is because for decades professional graphic artists and photographers have used and relied on apple.

See professional photographers don't buy dells, they buy macs, and when they realized their mac books weren't true 24-bit color they sued, and apple settled.

Dithering, its everywhere

[Gothmolly]

Go to Newegg and try to buy a flat panel that actually has 8 bit color. Even ones advertised as the full 16.7M colors don't - there are a number of websites out that either have or show you how to make a proper test pattern in PS - a non-dithered screen will produce smooth gradients, while a dithered screen will show 'steps' of color. Final test - watch a cutscene in a 3D game like NWN2 on a flat screen - dithering GALORE.

This is not as big of a travesty as it seems

[Cowclops]

I'm the guy that you'd find arguing over how much LCDs suck and how much better CRTs are a couple years ago. But my CRT died last month (Mitsubishi 19" Aperture Grille, it was about the best monitor you could get short of the 22" version of the same), and I picked up a Samsung 226CW. There are only two things it doesn't do as well as the CRT:

Absolute black level.
Off-axis viewing degradation.

The color is actually BETTER, DESPITE the 6 bit panel. The reason why 6 bit is not a big deal is because the panel response is so fast that it can temporally dither two colors into one, and you don't even notice that its doing it. For photography, its actually better color reproduction because its more consistent than CRT. On top of that, the "C" model in particular (as opposed to the 226BW) has a 95 CRI backlight, which means the spectrum the backlight produces is much less peaky and closer to natural sunlight. Altogether, the result is more accurate color than I'd get on a CRT. Plus I get 2ms response time so gaming is fine too.

The 226CW may be TN, but its one of the best panels out there. I thought I was going to be more disappointed than I actually was. In fact, I wasn't disappointed at all because it turned out better in most regards, not just "almost as good." It can produce smooth color because spatial and temporal dithering on fast monitors is surprisingly effective, and its actually more accurate because of the better quality back light.

Not that this was an article about CRT vs LCD, but I'm saying that TN panels have become common not just BECAUSE they're cheap but because the good ones (as cheap as they are) are SURPRISINGLY good. Apple may have used a shitty 6 bit panel instead of, say, Samsung's 6 bit panel, but the number of native colors is surprisingly not that big a deal, even if you're a picture-accuracy freak.

(It doesn't excuse them from not clarifying whether it was TN or IPS though, and in fact it pisses me off that no manufacturers are clear on what overall technology goes into their LCDs)

Dithering does help

[Solandri]

Dithering won't help; it puts noise into a nice, smooth gradient.

You're thinking of spatial dithering. LCD panels can use both spatial dithering and temporal dithering. With temporal dithering on a 6-bit panel, the sub-pixel can only be 64 possible states*, but you flip it rapidly between two states to approximate something in between. This is generally invisible to most people. If you can see older fluorescent lights flicker like I can, you may be able to notice it; but for most people for all intents and purposes it is indistinguishable from having 256 states. I can see it when I scan rapidly across my screen, but for static photo processing work it hasn't been a problem. Would I prefer a true 8-bit panel? Of course, but the difference is nowhere near the "98% fewer" or "dithered banding" people are complaining about.

*This in-betweening process [behardware.com] is what knocks down the available number of colors on 6-bit displays to 16.2 million instead of 16.7 million.

iPhone?

[themassiah]

I'm curious - and completely ignorant of how to find this information. What type of screen does the iPhone use? The WikiPedia entry doesn't give that much detail, or I don't know what I'm looking for. Thanks!

Re:No April Fools articles this year.

[gnasher719]

Eh? How does that work? If you lose just one bit of colour information, you go from 16.7 to 8.4 million colours. I think they must just be rounding or writing it down poorly.

I think you were not here last year or so, when exactly the same claim was made against Apple monitors (and again, only against Apple monitors, strangely enough not against any other identical monitors):

Each subpixel can display one of 64 values, lets say from 0 to 63. However, each subpixel also can change its value over time. During four consecutive clocks, the sub pixel can have two different values. For example, to produce the values 31 1/4, 31 1/2 and 31 3/4, change the value in a pattern 32-31-31-31, 32-32-31-31, or 32-32-32-31. That way, you achieve 253 different values from 0 to 63 in quarter steps. 16.2 million = 253 * 253 * 253.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[nxtw]

Typically, 24" screens and greater are not TN. This article [behardware.com] claims that the first 24" TN panel came out in mid 2007.

I can't imagine that there are many larger LCD TVs with TN panels, even among the cheap ones; the viewing angles would be unacceptable.

Re:If only...

[MojoStan]

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Windows PCs (including pretty much every laptop ever made) also use these "inferior" screens, and nobody's tried to sue Dell yet.

The majority of Windows PCs are non-specific about the superiority or inferiority of their screens. Dell doesn't lie about it. No fraud, no suit.

I just had to check the specs of Dell's (forgotten?) iMac competitor: the XPS One [dell.com]. From the specs:

• Display
  Large Size ( 20" )
  Widescreen
  High Definition: WSXGA (1680x1050) resolution at 16.7 million colors

Hmm... looks like an 8-bit panel.

• Viewing Angle (up to 80 degrees)
  Fast pixel-response rate (5ms typical for fast motion)

Fuck... that looks like a 6-bit TN panel. I'm assuming a viewing angle of "80 degrees" translates to "160 degrees," which is typical of TN panels. Also, I don't think current 8-bit panels can do 5ms (even with exaggerated response rate measurements).

OTOH, Dell doesn't potentially mislead buyers by comparing the quality of the XPS One's display to their 8-bit displays. Apple uses the same description ("Millions of colors at all resolutions") for both the 20" 6-bit and 24" 8-bit iMacs on their specs page [apple.com]. Apple's "iMac - Technology - Glossy widescreen display" page [apple.com] seems to say that the only difference between the two displays is their size and resolution:

• How do the displays compare? The 20-inch widescreen iMac offers a resolution of 1680 by 1050 pixels on its flat-panel LCD screen 36 percent more than the previous 17-inch iMac. The 24-inch iMac offers a panoramic resolution of 1920 by 1200 pixels 30 percent more screen real estate than the 20-inch model.

  Rich, vivid color.
  No matter what you like to do on your computer watch movies, edit photos, play games, even just view a screen saver its going to look stunning on an iMac.

I don't know if that's misleading enough to sue them, but that incomplete comparison is fuckin' annoying.

Re:Only 766 colours anyway.

[hankwang]

2. Open your favorite image editor. 3. Create a diagonal gradient starting with black and ending with 50% pure blue or green

(Shameless plug) Rather than creating the image yourself, you can also try The Lagom LCD test pages [lagom.nl] (and try lots of other monitor tests as well).

Re:No April Fools articles this year.

[Anonymous Coward]

False advertising? Where exactly does apple say the iMac's display outputs 'millions of colours'?

The 'millions of colours' option means (and has meant ever since the Mac IIfX) that a 24bit pallete is used rather than a 16bit pallete. How many colours the display natively supports is a completely different matter.

The culprit here isn't Apple, it's every consumer that ever bought a cheap display and priced true 24bit displays out of the low and midrange market. On any platform if you use a '32bit' or '24bit' setting, you're more than likely not going to be getting that resolution (or even close to it) on your display, whoever the manufacturer.

Show me any audio interface which claims to be 24bit or 16bit resolution and I'll show you it's actual SNR. 98% is a also misleading, like audio color perception is logarithmic. A 16 bit audio CD has 99.996% less audio thingamyjigs than a 24bit professional audio card, but strangely they sound about the same to the untrained ear. 'Creative' declared and actually measured noise floors have always been miles off (when you look at the number 96dB, it's a misprint, they actually mean 69dB)

Who would have thought that the 'low end' mac would have a 'low end' display in it. Nobody expects any other low and mid-range machine to bundle with a professional display, so why should apple users just because they edit some fotos from time to time.

Apples to apples, not apples to lemur testicles.

Professional graphic artists, photographers, compositors and video editors should rightly demand a full pallete, but then that's what those pricey cinema displays are for.