Baytzim

Apple and their Colorful Lies

2009 July 14 post from swirsky

If you have a MacBook Pro, you'll see a vertical line about 25% in from the right hand edge. That's because your computer has only 6 bits of color per channel, for a total of 2^18 colors, or 262,144.

Apple, in its advertising literature, has claimed "Millions of Colors" for these displays. That apparently is not true.

For an in-depth look at this deception, read this posting from Louie Mantia.

Comments

at 9:45 p.m. on July 14, 2009, zowie says...

Er, a quick look at the "Apple and their Colorful Lies" image shows that it is flawed. The linear artifacts are from the corresponding color saturating -- e.g. the vertical line about 25% in from the right hand edge is visible because that is where the blue channel reaches a value of 255, while the red channel continues decreasing in the +X direction.

This image appears to be an attempt at a constant-brightness slice through the color solid; the artifacts are simply the edges of the valid portion of the slice, and can be expected on *any* display regardless of how many bits are allocated to individual color planes.

at 7:19 a.m. on July 15, 2009, swirsky says...

On another Mac display, my 30" Cinema, it displays fine. It looks perfect on my HP LP2475w wide-gamut monitor.

I've done a color calibration on my MacBook Pro, Cinema display, and HP monitor so I know they're displaying these images as best they can.

That image is a CbCr color slice at Y=.5

at 8:24 a.m. on July 15, 2009, voodoo says...

Looks fine on a Cinema display because it is an IPS (In-Plan Switching) panel. Laptops are usually the cheaper and more inferior TN (Twisted Nematic) technology which absolutely does have challenges with adhering to strict NTSC color reproduction. Apple has always gotten away with marketing more than they deliver to their religiously loyal following.

at 10:33 a.m. on July 15, 2009, swirsky says...

How can you say anything bad about Apple, Mr. Voodoo? I don't mind paying more for my Apple notebooks because Steve Jobs needs the money. Livers aren't cheap, you know.

at 10:53 a.m. on July 15, 2009, zowie says...

Er, what exactly are the artifacts you're describing? on *all* of my displays (including an old color CRT I keep around for things like this) I see a faint light-colored vertical line where swirsky pointed it out. On my cheap Sceptre TN LCD, I also see some faint colored bands around the border, that look like quantum steps of display brightness due to the gamma correction MacOS applies. (Changing the monitor calibration to a generic value gets rid of them).

at 10:48 p.m. on July 15, 2009, zowie says...

Meh. Meritocracy, schmeritocracy. Thanks for the demo, Baytzim. I think you aspire to be like the witty USENET of the early 1990s, but you only managed to capture the snark. (Or is it just that USENET was never more than a gigantic snarkfest anyhow?)

Well, I can't seem to get my mouse onto "Peru" faster than 12 seconds, and I'm not particularly impressed with the (lack of) scintillation in the comment threads, so I think Baytzim is not for me. Er, good luck though.

at 11:07 p.m. on July 15, 2009, swirsky says...

That wasn't Peru! That was New Jersey!

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