How many colors can you see? Thousands? Millions?
(Credit: Apple)
Posted on 03/26/2008 12:38:28 PM PDT by CarrotAndStick
The heated debate over whether Apple is tricking you into believing you can see millions of colors on your Mac has come to a quiet conclusion.
The Chicago Tribune noted last week (spotted by AppleInsider) that Apple has settled a lawsuit brought by two professional photographers claiming that the company falsely advertised the capabilities of their MacBook Pros as being able to display "millions of colors."
The plaintiffs claimed that Apple could achieve those heights only through "dithering."
How many colors can you see? Thousands? Millions?
(Credit: Apple)
There's an option in the Displays screen, under System Preferences in Mac OS X, in which you can set the Colors option to "millions." The thing is, the MacBook Pro uses a 6-bit display, and Apple can get to that "millions" number only by using a technique called dithering, which basically blends pixels together to create a shading effect.
The plaintiffs claimed that this use of dithering affected their ability to edit their photos and constituted false advertising, since a 6-bit display is capable only of rendering 262,144 colors without resorting to dithering, not "millions."
Few others seem to care, however; The Tribune said the plaintiffs' lawyer declined to take the case to the limits "because it was difficult to find other people who were wronged because they had bought Macs solely based on the 'millions of colors' claim." Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
A representative at the San Diego County Superior Court said the case was actually dismissed last year, and so it's not clear why this took so long to come to light. But the outcome is not all that surprising, and I'm left wondering if it took "millions of dollars" for this case to disappear.
Apple has not removed the "millions" option from the display preferences for Mac OS X Leopard.
My wife also only sees in three colors.
Green, Gold and Chocolate.
Ahh, I thought they meant six bits per pixel, not per color plane. Makes sense. THanks to you and the others who answered me.
LCD colour monitor gamut is a function of the backlighting that it is equipped with. Newer laptops use LEDs, whose emitted spectrum is better suited to display a wider range of colours than the ones equipped with a fluorescent tube-based backlighting.
Isn’t it red, blue and yellow?
The MacBooks screen buffer may use shared memory in the main RAM rather than separate memory. And the screen buffer probably stores the data as 24 or 32 bits per pixel anyway, and the screen circuitry just ignores the two least-significant-bits per sub-pixel. Six-bit subpixels cannot be packed in memory very efficiently, so the screen buffer might as well use a full byte for each subpixel, especially since memory is so cheap nowadays.
Ahh, thanks!
I only see three.
Blonde, brunette and redhead.
For the life of me, that sounds like something that would come out of Dean Martin's mouth in a roast. Good show, my friend, good show.
You're not hitting the right clubs ...
Only in a subtractive color palette--and even then, it is more common to use magenta instead of red, and cyan instead of blue.
I wonder how many angels dancing on the head of a pin an Apple could display.
Thanks for the info.
Can’t we all just move on past this “color” thing?.........
And they only see one color: green....
...and gold....and chocolate.
Red, green, blue.
6 bits per color channel (6 bits for red, 6 bits for green, and 6 bits for blue). In the digital photography world color depth is almost always referred to in this manner. It can get a bit confusing for anyone used to the idea that an 8-bit display can only show 256 colors.
What about the video cards that have luminance and chrominance rather than RGB? The color looked washed out compared to true 24-bit color, although they used to advertise them as 24-bit color. Dang, I forget — I want to say it was 8 bits of luminance and no more than 8 bits of chrominance.
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