3 ms·

At the minimum, it's faulty marketing on Apple's product. They shouldn't state that it supports millions of colors when it actually doesn't. Just like the CRT

by catch23 17y ago

At the minimum, it's faulty marketing on Apple's product. They shouldn't state that it supports millions of colors when it actually doesn't. Just like the CRT monitors that are 17" but only 15" viewable... sometimes that stuff doesn't change until someone files a lawsuit.

randallsquared 17y ago
It "supports" millions of colors; it just displays some of them with multiple pixel tricks. Which is probably fine with me -- I haven't seen a comparison where I could tell the difference without blowing the pixels up.
- greendestiny 17y ago
  Thats the least compelling definition of supports millions of colours I've ever heard. So did my EGA display adapter in the 80s then. I'd be furious if I bought a 6-bit monitor in this day and age and it wasn't spelled in giant letters all over the thing.
  - duskwuff 17y ago
    You must be furious pretty often, then - because the vast majority of LCDs sold today, with the exception of a few expensive high-end displays, use 6-bit color. (This is 6 bits per channel, not 6 bits per pixel, by the way.)
- bonaldi 17y ago
  The difference leaps out at you if you've done any sort of colour work at all. I can even see in the gradients on the Finder window toolbars.
  - dchest 17y ago
    This probably means that you have a defective display. I have a 17" MacBook Pro that has this kind of defect, where I can see bad gradients, etc. However, three other Macs in our possession doesn't have this issue.
- JimmyL 17y ago
  I agree. Most people don't know how LCDs work, don't know what dithering is, and wouldn't know what 6bit or 8bit meant if their life depended on it. To these - the majority - of people, "millions of colors" is "millions of colors", and any losses by dithering be damned. They would ask "if I looked at my monitor, could it show me 'millions of colors'?" to which the one-word answer is "yes". If you had some time, you could expand it to be "yes, but the majority of those are done by this process called dithering, which is when..." and the person you're talking to has lost interest and/or gotten confused. To them, color is color, and they don't care about dithering since it's not visible to them. This is who marketing is designed for. When most people here see an ad for a system, they immediately skip all the marketing bits and go to the stats, and from that get a good mental idea about the performance of the system, where the bottlenecks will be, etc. When "average" people see an ad for a system they look at the ad copy that says "will launch Word in half the time", decide that that's what they need, and buy the thing. Ad copy caters to, and explains in context for, the lowest common denominator. If you're not that, then you should be looking elsewhere (at the fine print, the stats, the asterisk at the bottom of the page, etc.) to draw your own conclusions.

by catch23 17y ago

randallsquared 17y ago

It "supports" millions of colors; it just displays some of them with multiple pixel tricks. Which is probably fine with me -- I haven't seen a comparison where I could tell the difference without blowing the pixels up.

greendestiny 17y ago
Thats the least compelling definition of supports millions of colours I've ever heard. So did my EGA display adapter in the 80s then. I'd be furious if I bought a 6-bit monitor in this day and age and it wasn't spelled in giant letters all over the thing.
- duskwuff 17y ago
  You must be furious pretty often, then - because the vast majority of LCDs sold today, with the exception of a few expensive high-end displays, use 6-bit color. (This is 6 bits per channel, not 6 bits per pixel, by the way.)
bonaldi 17y ago
The difference leaps out at you if you've done any sort of colour work at all. I can even see in the gradients on the Finder window toolbars.
- dchest 17y ago
  This probably means that you have a defective display. I have a 17" MacBook Pro that has this kind of defect, where I can see bad gradients, etc. However, three other Macs in our possession doesn't have this issue.
JimmyL 17y ago
I agree. Most people don't know how LCDs work, don't know what dithering is, and wouldn't know what 6bit or 8bit meant if their life depended on it. To these - the majority - of people, "millions of colors" is "millions of colors", and any losses by dithering be damned. They would ask "if I looked at my monitor, could it show me 'millions of colors'?" to which the one-word answer is "yes". If you had some time, you could expand it to be "yes, but the majority of those are done by this process called dithering, which is when..." and the person you're talking to has lost interest and/or gotten confused. To them, color is color, and they don't care about dithering since it's not visible to them. This is who marketing is designed for. When most people here see an ad for a system, they immediately skip all the marketing bits and go to the stats, and from that get a good mental idea about the performance of the system, where the bottlenecks will be, etc. When "average" people see an ad for a system they look at the ad copy that says "will launch Word in half the time", decide that that's what they need, and buy the thing. Ad copy caters to, and explains in context for, the lowest common denominator. If you're not that, then you should be looking elsewhere (at the fine print, the stats, the asterisk at the bottom of the page, etc.) to draw your own conclusions.