MacBook Pro, Thousands of Colors

Post by lallysingh » Thu, Jul 16, 2009, 4:35 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #62

lallysingh wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The eye can see lots more than 262,144 colors. What's the number, 10 mil? Quick googling gave varying results, depending on what's counted as a distinct color (e.g. differences in luminance).

Yes but a 6 bit display accomplishes millions of colors through dithering, and your answer says nothing about whether that kind of dithering could fool the eye. Since all colors on a LCD screen are dithered between red, green, and blue anyway, and the human eye has no trouble handling that , the question is whether a higher level dithering would be similarly undetectable.

Post by CamperBob » Thu, Jul 16, 2009, 5:15 AM UTC

GHFigs wrote: post #44

bcl wrote: post #15

Interesting. The Apple MacBook Pro website makes no distinction between the models as to the color support. They all say "millions of colors", and as someone who doesn't deal with colors for a living I would expect them to have identical support.

Technically, a 6-bit display can display all of the same colors that an 8-bit display can. What it can't do is display all of them at the same time . Edit: Why all the drive-by downvoting? This is true to the best of my knowledge.

Post by CamperBob » Thu, Jul 16, 2009, 5:19 AM UTC

ghshephard wrote: post #37

Does anybody know why Apple won't just come out and declare whether the 13" MacBook has 6 Bit or 8 Bit color? As a side note - this is why I love HN - I remember the class action lawsuit over colors and Apple a few years ago (or at least discussion around it) - but I didn't know what it was over. Now I have insight into the differences in LCD color qualities and get the insight that the 13" MacBook pro isn't _really_…

Post by dcurtis » Thu, Jul 16, 2009, 5:40 AM UTC

JimmyL wrote: post #70

jm4 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not entirely fair. The specific information he was looking for is not made available to the public by Apple. He was only able to find the information after getting the model number for the display and checking with the vendor. There was no way of knowing exactly which display was used without access to a MacBook Pro because that's not information made public by Apple, either. It's an awfully roundabout way of…

>>It's called a MacBook Pro and is marketed at more demanding users, i.e. professionals Which "professionals"? 8bit color is important to pretty much one professional group: graphic artists/designers (maybe two, if you include people doing video work). For the vast majority of people - "professional" or otherwise - 6bit vs. 8bit color doesn't matter. It looks good, it's fast, it runs what they want. Those are the thi…

Post by jmillikin » Thu, Jul 16, 2009, 5:50 AM UTC

Skeuomorph wrote: post #110

jmillikin wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple advertises it as being able to display millions of colors despite the fact that it really only displays 262,144. A 6-bit display is capable of displaying more than 6 bits of color information, using a technique named temporal dithering. For an example, open this image on a 6-bit display: http://imgur.com/BeVicl.png >. If the display could only display 262k colors, the squares would look identical.

Thank you, as this puts paid to anyone here saying there's no visible difference except to pixel peepers. (Well, assuming one is comparing on a true 8 bit screen.)