HP Introduces First-Ever 30-bit, 1 Billion Color Display 236
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."
GIMMEH (Score:5, Insightful)
Registration (Score:5, Insightful)
It might be better to avoid stories from people (justechn, roland p, etc) that just link to their websites. Especially those that require registration.
Slashdot should not be giving these guys (and their like) the free publicity that they figure they deserve.
Dithering (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Registration (Score:4, Insightful)
Cool - This means cheaper *real* displays! (Score:2, Insightful)
Or, put another way, yet another display that can show about 999 million more colors than most people can tell apart (or in my case, 999,999,000, aka "six-nines of wasted color").
With 6 built-in color spaces [...snip...] you can easily switch to the one that best suits your applications and process.
Translation - Users will always pick the wrong one, "guaranteeing" that they never see the right thing.
Confused... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hype (Score:3, Insightful)
"Guaranteed" to look like print? (Score:3, Insightful)
Print reflects light, montors emit light. You can get close-ish, but that's about it.
All in all, if you still want acurate color, you'll still need to do a print/press check.
Re:Hype (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Open photoshop.
2) Make a gradient from 0-0-0 RGB to 255-0-0 RGB. This covers every possible variation of the red channel in a 16.7 million color space. Draw the gradient across your whole screen.
3) Look at the color banding and say, "Oh, I guess I can see why 30 bit color would be noticeable."
Re:Hype (Score:2, Insightful)
Exactly! People who work in color managed work flows need exact color representation and will want this. We need to know that what we see is what will be in a publication.
I would say the entry price is a bit steep, except that pro photographers will spend twice as much on a camera body alone. They will keep that camera body for less time than they will keep this monitor.
Re:"Guaranteed" to look like print? (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem you have with printing and especially film printing is that the color gamuts of various printing methods are different from and only partially overlapping with the gamuts of regular monitors. That is, the monitor can show colors that the print can't show, and vice versa.
What they did with this displays is build a device that has a very wide gamut, so it can cover the full gamut of the output medium. What that means is that you can now calibrate your display to show exactly the same colors as the print. It is still going to be a bitch to keep the device calibrated, but at least it is possible now.
Re:Hype (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember - "bigger is better" for most people. I can hardly watch typical HDTV due to how hard they stomp on the video for compression, as the macro blocking is too distracting to me (web content tends to be better, as most web producers actually CARE about that kind of thing). At least SDTV tends to be too soft of a picture to have bad macro blocking, and they don't need to compress it has hard in the first place to send it down the tubes.
Re:Dithering (Score:1, Insightful)
While you can certainly complain that some monitors have more visible dithering than others, only an idiot would maintain that some monitors dither and others don't. I'd love for somebody to show me a monitor which can produce a true yellow, instead of faking it with small red and green dots.
Re:Cool - This means cheaper *real* displays! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Registration (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:GIMMEH (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just a bit of overkill (Score:2, Insightful)
Men and women's perceptions of color (and smell) are typically just as good. The problem is we're specialized in WHAT smells/colors/sounds/etc we pick up.
You typically see an article on MSN/Yahoo/etc about once a year on amazing new research showing that men can't see color as well as women, thus explaining why men suck at color coordination.
The tendency for men to have more rods than women but less cones (or vice versa I forget) is a tendency, and not a hard and fast rule. Men typically have better "vision" in terms of luminosity, while women have better "vision" in terms of chroma.
Much of what our eyes take in is filtered/dumped/preprocessed before it travels down the optic nerve.
The military used to (and probably still does) seek out color blind people to look at aerial photographs because their brains had learned to deal with visual input differently, and they were able to see camouflaged bases/vehicles/etc more easily than normal-sighted people.
On the flip side, women who can see four colors (tetramats) have a wider range in terms of color, but probably have less accuracy.
Someone working in a field where super accurate color information is required is likely to learn to process that information. (Assuming a healthy pair of eyes). Mechanics learn to smell certain things, wine snobs train their tongues, and audiophiles are a bunch of braying jackasses who spend way too much on cables.