Live data from Hacker News

24-bit color sucks

tiamat.tsotech.com

51–60 of 90 posts

Re: 24-bit color sucks

#51
post #20

What on earth is with all the motion on the website. Just because you can do animation doesn't mean you should.

I don't think it wouldn't have been so bad if it was slower, like clouds on a not very breezy day. As it is, it felt like it was trying to hypnotize me.

Re: 24-bit color sucks

#52

I'm missing the part about what awesome thing would be possible to do with higher-bit displays. The answer for higher-DPI displays is obvious: everything looks sharper, all the time. While it may be true that 30-bit color would allow the gradient between those two grays to be gradual instead of a single step, when does someone actually want to draw a gradient between such similar shades of gray?

It's not about gradients between gray shades. It's about more shades, which is useful in DTP, video and film, digital painting and so on. If you ever have a chance, take a look at a high quality picture or video on a display like Eizo CG275W (or newer like 276) connected to 30-bit output capable card (Quadros have it, GeForce don't). It's a whole level above what you see on regular monitors, even calibrated. OTOH, they are really expensive - I get by with calibrator and regular monitors.

Re: 24-bit color sucks

#53

The number of bytes of memory available on GPUs is hardly the biggest issue when considering rendering at more than 8 bits per channel of color precision. Even producing a 30-bit framebuffer (as has been supported for a while on many desktop GPUs) comes at a performance penalty and is incompatible with many pieces of software and hardware. Modern GPUs actually allow 16 bits per channel of precision when rendering, bu…

As far as I know, most modern PC GPUs actually use a 32-bit framebuffer with 8 bits of padding for their 24-bit colour mode and do all shader computations in floating point already, so 30-bit colour isn't going to use any more memory bandwidth or shader time.

Re: 24-bit color sucks

#54
post #46

Green is always the worst offender https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1437645/banding.png

I don't see anything wrong with your image. The gradient looks perfect on my monitor. Edit: it looks perfect because my sw/hw config (driver Xorg fbdev 0.4.2, AMD Fusion E-350, Lenovo X120e laptop) does automatic dithering. I can see a tiny bit of dithering on the white end of the other gradient posted by nhw: http://file.st/KWb7XS7x Other that that, no banding on either images. Dithering invisible on yours. Ditherin…

Same, on my similar E-350 Lenovo E325. Using the proprietary driver.

Re: 24-bit color sucks

#55
post #20

What on earth is with all the motion on the website. Just because you can do animation doesn't mean you should.

Agreed. There's a control in the bottom right corner to control the speed of/stop it, but the animation shouldn't be there to start with.

Re: 24-bit color sucks

#56
post #50

I agree. Displays in general suck. The display on the RMBP is a step in the right direction, but there's still a lot of work to be done. Anyone who settles for "good enough" may as well live life like it's the 16th century. It was "good enough" then too. My vision for the future? Specifications that fully exceed the human capacity for discernibility. 2880x1800? Nope, I can still see aliasing (particularly in Terminal…

While we're at it, let's also add 3D to displays.

Mine already has it. Doesn't yours?

Re: 24-bit color sucks

#58

An important item is missing in this discussion. Several monitors turn your 8-bpp image to a 6-bpp image.

How would we determine if our screen is doing that?

If it's an LCD and you didn't pay a lot for it, then it's doing that.

Graphic designers usually pay for good quality monitors, but they would be well served by also having a bad monitor to check what their work looks like for most people.

Re: 24-bit color sucks

#59

I don't see any difference between those two bars, and my eyes are generally pretty good. 24bit is fine. It's <200dpi that has to die.

I don't see it either :-/

I've zoomed it in until the bars almost filled the screen and I still didn't see any gradient, despite reading in the text it should have been so obvious. Kind of defeats the point about 24 bit sucking...

Post reply on HN