HP Introduces First-Ever 30-bit, 1 Billion Color Display

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."

Hype

[mathimus1863]

This is really just hype more than anything. Remember that article about like 50% of people with HDTVs think they are viewing in HD but it turns out they're not (b/c of having wrong cables, etc)? It's the same with colors--the eyes just can't distinguish between a display with 10 million colors and a billion colors. Personally I think you're wasting your money buying this thing. But at the very least, maybe the price of "inferior" monitors will go down if this goes mainstream, so I shouldn't complain.

"considered color critical"?

[Andy_R]

Is "considered color critical" anything other than meaningless hype? Is there a graphics card that can feed it with more than 24bits of color information, and any software that works with that combination? More importantly, what's the resolution of the display, how black is it's black, and is it's colour gamut any larger than a normal monitor?

I'd need a lot more information before I consider this to be a competitor to the SWOP certified 2560x1600 pixel screen I'm using now.

Re:Just a bit of overkill

[Hijacked Public]

I don't particularly want 1 billion colors, I actually just want 1 new one: black.

Not a very slightly gray-black, but silver-print-face-of-the-half-dome black.

Re:Here's a proper link

[dkf]

Does it use the same number of pixels per channel? I hope not. Here's why: the human eye is not equally sensitive to each of the three primary colors; we can see quite a lot finer differences in green than in blue (red comes between the two extremes). To show this, create a simple monochromatic stepped gradient image in green and another in blue. Now eyeball them using a viewer that doesn't do fancy gamma correction; on a 24bpp display you should be able to see the steps on the green image (assuming normal color vision) but you'll have real problems doing that with the blue image.

Re:Hype

[egomaniac]

I bought a 50" plasma some years ago, and was showing a few of my friends SDTV channels versus HDTV channels. Now, this was a very high-end plasma, properly calibrated, showing some of the prettiest content on Discovery HD, so we are talking a KICK YOU IN THE FACE improvement that anybody with half a brain should have been able to appreciate.

One was suitably impressed. The second said that she could kind of see a difference, but didn't really care. The third said she couldn't even tell.

I suspect these are the same people that buy a nice 24" LCD and then run it in 800x600 resolution. Sadly, I have seen this. After fixing it, I have then seen these same people maintain that aside from the aspect ratio change, they couldn't tell the difference.

Evidently a lot of people desperately need glasses and have absolutely no idea how bad their vision is. The weird part is that even when this is pointed out to them -- "Wait, you seriously can't tell the difference between 800x600 and 1920x1200? Please, for the love of Zeus get your eyes checked!" -- they generally act completely nonplussed and never bother to see an optometrist. I just don't get it. Why do so many people not care about having sharp eyesight?

Re:Hype

[egomaniac]

Did you know? Many LCD monitors, even if they claim to, don't actually support 24-bit color!

If you do this test and can see prominent color banding, then either you're using a crappy monitor or you have superhuman color vision. I performed this test on my Dell 2405FPW, and I see absolutely no color banding in red or blue and only the slightest, itty-bittiest hint of it in green.

I don't believe for a second that the average person could see color banding in this test at all, let alone easily.

Re:Just a bit of overkill

[GleeBot]

There are some interesting comments about whether or not the human eye can actually distinguish all these colors, but I think they miss the point about the true purpose of the extra bits.

It's so you can throw them away.

Achieving color accuracy requires a lot more than just having a lot of precision. If any given display can output 2^30 different shades, that still doesn't get you accuracy, because you want any given 3x8-bit color to map to a precise one of those 2^30 shades.

The extra bits give you room to make minor adjustments to get exactly the color you want. You'll notice how they mention a laundry list of color spaces that they support, each with a slightly different mapping from 24-bit color to what this monitor outputs.

Dynamic range is a red herring; these displays aren't designed to produce high dynamic range (check out the BrightSide monitor if you want to see where that tech is going). They're designed to be perfect, idealized versions of what you've got in your living room. It doesn't do you much good to proof on a supermonitor which doesn't resemble the final output device. (And yes, output to film stock does provide plenty of opportunity for dynamic range, but that's still not the point of these monitors.)

Re:Hype

[GleeBot]

I'll back this up, in case anyone doesn't believe him. After I bought a colorimeter and calibrated my display, gradients have almost no stepping (even though the calibration process actually removes colors, because it maps to a subset of the available colors). And I don't even have particularly nice monitors, like the 2405FPW.

I find it amusing how most people don't even realize how poorly calibrated their monitors are. If they don't come out poorly calibrated from the factory or the store, someone fiddles with the picture settings and skews everything way off.

Try this little experiment: Post a picture of something online, then ask a few different people to describe it. It's amusing how many widely different descriptions you get of the same colors.

Video card?

[jgoemat]

Are there any video cards that support the extra colors, or is there something else where the display can more accurately represent the color based on color space without actually changing the bits per channel sent from the video card? I th ink Matrox had a 30 bit video card at one point...