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The Byte Order Fiasco

justine.lol

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Re: The Byte Order Fiasco

#371

Post by jart »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #366
jart wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you recommend me a good PC computer display at any cost that has an objectively good gamut so I can see what you see?

I'm sorry, I'm not sure that I understand ?

Well I figured since you feel strongly about using a type wider than 8-bits for RGB you must have a really good display that actually lets you perceive the colors that enables you to encode. Most PC displays are garbage including the expensive ones because first, sRGB only specifies a very small portion of light that's perceivable and secondly, any display maker who builds something better is going to run into complaints about how terrible netflix looks, because it reveals things like banding (which you mentioned) that otherwise wouldn't be perceivable. So I was hoping you could recommend me a better monitor, so I can get into >8 bit RGB, because I've found it exceedingly difficult to shop around for this kind of thing.

Re: The Byte Order Fiasco

#372

Post by BlueTemplar »

jart wrote: post #371
BlueTemplar wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure that I understand ?

Well I figured since you feel strongly about using a type wider than 8-bits for RGB you must have a really good display that actually lets you perceive the colors that enables you to encode. Most PC displays are garbage including the expensive ones because first, sRGB only specifies a very small portion of light that's perceivable and secondly, any display maker who builds something better is going to run into compla…

Ok, so you weren't sarcastic and/or misunderstanding my use of "atomic".

Sadly, I kind of gave up on getting a "HDR" display, at least for now, because :

- AFAIK neither Linux nor Windows have good enough "HDR" support yet. (MacOS supposedly does, but I'm not interested.)

- I'm happy enough with my HP LP2475w which I got for dirt cheap just before "HDR" became a thing. I consider the 1920x1200 resolution to be perfect for now (as a bonus I can manually scale various old resolutions like 800x600 to be pixel-perfect) - too many programs/OSes still have issues with auto-scaling programs on higher resolution screens (which would come with "HDR"). I'm also particularly fond of the 16:10 ratio, which seems to have gone extinct.

- Maybe I'll be able to run this monitor properly in wide gamuts (though with banding), or maybe even in some kind of ""HDR" compatibility mode", though it would seem that the current sellers of "HDR" screens aren't going to make that easy. I might be able to get a colorimeter soon to properly calibrate it.

Re: The Byte Order Fiasco

#373

Post by BlueTemplar »

spacechild1 wrote: post #367
BlueTemplar wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because these days it's critical for "basic computer literacy" : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27094663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27104860 (You'll also notice that caring about not wasting the 8th bit with ASCII has lead us into all sorts of issues... and why care so much about it when as soon as data density becomes important, we can use compression which AFAIK easily rids us of padding ?)

You're basically arguing against variable width text encodings - which is ok. But you know, it's entirely possible to use UTF32. In fact, some programming languages use it by default to represent strings. But again and again, all of this has nothing to do with the size of a byte. BTW, are you aware that 8-bit Microcontrollers are still in widespread use and nowhere near of being discontinued?

Static width text encoding + Unicode = Cannot fit a "character" in a single octet, which currently is the default addressable unit of storage/memory.

Programming microcontrollers isn't considered to be "mandatory computer literacy" in college, while basic scripting, which involves understanding how text is encoded at the storage/memory level - is.

Re: The Byte Order Fiasco

#374

Post by jart »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #372
jart wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I figured since you feel strongly about using a type wider than 8-bits for RGB you must have a really good display that actually lets you perceive the colors that enables you to encode. Most PC displays are garbage including the expensive ones because first, sRGB only specifies a very small portion of light that's perceivable and secondly, any display maker who builds something better is going to run into compla…

Ok, so you weren't sarcastic and/or misunderstanding my use of "atomic". Sadly, I kind of gave up on getting a "HDR" display, at least for now, because : - AFAIK neither Linux nor Windows have good enough "HDR" support yet. (MacOS supposedly does, but I'm not interested.) - I'm happy enough with my HP LP2475w which I got for dirt cheap just before "HDR" became a thing. I consider the 1920x1200 resolution to be perfec…

If you have a $200 monitor then it probably struggles to make proper use of 8-bit formats. I have a display that claims to simulate DICOM but it's not enough I want more. However I'm not willing to spend $3000 on a display which doesn't have engineering specs and then send it back because it doesn't work. I don't care about resolution. I care about being able to see the unseen. I care about edge cases like yellow and blue making pink. That was the first significant finding Maxwell reported on when he invented RGB. However nearly every monitor ever made mixes those two colors wrong, as gray, due to subpixel layout issues. Nearly every scaling algorithm mixes those two colors wrong too, due to the way sRGB was designed. It's amazing how poorly color is modeled on personal computers. https://justine.lol/maxwell.png

Re: The Byte Order Fiasco

#375

Post by BlueTemplar »

jart wrote: post #374
BlueTemplar wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so you weren't sarcastic and/or misunderstanding my use of "atomic". Sadly, I kind of gave up on getting a "HDR" display, at least for now, because : - AFAIK neither Linux nor Windows have good enough "HDR" support yet. (MacOS supposedly does, but I'm not interested.) - I'm happy enough with my HP LP2475w which I got for dirt cheap just before "HDR" became a thing. I consider the 1920x1200 resolution to be perfec…

If you have a $200 monitor then it probably struggles to make proper use of 8-bit formats. I have a display that claims to simulate DICOM but it's not enough I want more. However I'm not willing to spend $3000 on a display which doesn't have engineering specs and then send it back because it doesn't work. I don't care about resolution. I care about being able to see the unseen. I care about edge cases like yellow and…

Well, when released in 2008 it was a $600 monitor, I got it second-hand for 80€.

I'm not sure what DICOM has to do with color reproduction quality ? Also it seems to be a quite a bit older standard than sRGB...

By definition, you can't "see the unseen". "Yellow" and "blue" are opponent "colors", so, by definition, a proper mixture of them is going to give you grey :

https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color2.html#opponentfunctio...

Also, when talking about subtle color effects, you have to consider that personal variation might come into play (for instance red-green "colorblindness" is a spectrum).

Re: The Byte Order Fiasco

#376

Post by jart »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #375
jart wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a $200 monitor then it probably struggles to make proper use of 8-bit formats. I have a display that claims to simulate DICOM but it's not enough I want more. However I'm not willing to spend $3000 on a display which doesn't have engineering specs and then send it back because it doesn't work. I don't care about resolution. I care about being able to see the unseen. I care about edge cases like yellow and…

Well, when released in 2008 it was a $600 monitor, I got it second-hand for 80€. I'm not sure what DICOM has to do with color reproduction quality ? Also it seems to be a quite a bit older standard than sRGB... By definition, you can't "see the unseen". "Yellow" and "blue" are opponent "colors", so, by definition, a proper mixture of them is going to give you grey : https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color2.html#oppone…

It looks like this thing is the thing I want to buy https://www.apple.com/pro-display-xdr/ There's plenty of light that is currently unseeable. Look at chromaticity chart for sRGB. If your definition of color mixes yellow and blue and as grey then you've defined color wrong, because nature has a different definition where it's pink. For example the CIELAB colorspace will mix the two as pink. Also I'm not colorblind. If I'm on the spectrum I would be on the able to see more color more accurately end of the spectrum. Although when designing charts I'm very good at choosing colors that accommodate people who are colorblind, while still looking stylish, because I feel like inclusive technology is important.

Re: The Byte Order Fiasco

#377

Post by spacechild1 »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #373
spacechild1 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're basically arguing against variable width text encodings - which is ok. But you know, it's entirely possible to use UTF32. In fact, some programming languages use it by default to represent strings. But again and again, all of this has nothing to do with the size of a byte. BTW, are you aware that 8-bit Microcontrollers are still in widespread use and nowhere near of being discontinued?

Static width text encoding + Unicode = Cannot fit a "character" in a single octet, which currently is the default addressable unit of storage/memory. Programming microcontrollers isn't considered to be "mandatory computer literacy" in college, while basic scripting, which involves understanding how text is encoded at the storage/memory level - is.

Again and again and again, a byte is not meant to hold a text character. Also, as the sibling parent has pointed out, fixed width encoding only gets you so far because it doesn't help with grapheme clusters. That's probably why the world has basically settled with UTF8: it saves memory and destroys any notion that every abstract text character can somehow be represented by a single number.

> mandatory computer literacy

I don't understand why you keep bringing up this phrase and ignore a huge part of real world computing. College students should simply learn how Unicode works. Are you seriously demanding that CPU designers should change their chip design instead?

Re: The Byte Order Fiasco

#378

Post by mrlonglong »

dragonwriter wrote: post #313
bitwize wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two similar societies warring over a trivial idea probably means neither is right. Swift's Big Endians and Little Endians are a satire of the Catholic-Anglican schism in England.

> Two similar societies warring over a trivial idea probably means neither is right. Well, sure, that it’s a trivial idea pretty much inherently means either that neither is right or (and this is very much not an exclusive or) being right doesn’t matter. The problem with real cases is that people inside the conflict don’t believe the idea is trivial (conversely, to people outside rhe conflict—or caught in the middle—…

Case in point: Israel and Palestine :-(
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