Apple Silicon M1 supports “billion of colors” a.k.a. HDR 10-bit output
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Actually color in the history of Apple stems from Woz not Jobs, who added color to Apple II. Jobs in fact reverted to black and white in Macintosh/original NeXT and spent the compute/memory resources on other things (e.g. higher res).
An additional factor may have been speed, since it was doing things with graphics that may have been too slow if they had to manipulate larger blocks of data.
The IBM EGA card came out in 1984, same year as the Mac, and supported 640x350 with 16 colors, but I think the cost of the monitor + card was somewhere around $1K, and the 640x350@4bpp mode was only supported if you also bought a RAM expansion daughterboard. The Mac’s launch price was $2,500, for comparison.
Adjusting for inflation, the EGA card was something around $2,500 in 2020 dollars, and the Mac was around $6,200.
The Apple II was not capable of high-resolution color, with or without the 80-column card. You would have used the 80-column card with a monochrome monitor. I don't remember whether I ever used it personally.
I couldn't find any pictures of Kaypros with color screens. Was it uncommon?
Ahh, yes, the parent of your post..."The memory resources must have been tight, because the original Mac had like a 512x342 pixel display, not even enough to display a full page width of text."
My thought was, “Why didn’t the Mac have color?” and I was comparing it to color systems that had similar or better resolution than the Mac… and I think that’s only EGA, and maybe some workstations I don’t know about.
The year before, someone demonstrated a Lisa at my college, and of course I was excited by what I was reading in Byte Magazine (though it was over my head), but the early Mac was just out of my reach. The Sanyo seemed like a step above my mom's Apple II.
The IBM PCjr also came out the same year as the Mac and the 128KB model supported 640x200 with 4 colors (and up to 320x200 with 16). A lot less expensive than a PC with EGA.
To give you an idea how tight that is, 64KB (code in ROM) is just 12 paper pages (60 lines of 80 columns) of text. Yes, some of the code had to be stored on a boot floppy disk, but still. To say it was an amazing piece of software engineering is, IMO, an understatement.
When I saw my first Mac at the university store it was like seeing the future. That so many of my peers denigrated it as a "toy" left me mystified. Instead of buying a car with the money I saved up, I bought myself a Mac.
Same here. I bought a Lisa too because you had to have a Lisa to write code for the Mac back then. My Lisa had a 5 MB hard drive (no I didn't omit any zeros).
Wow. I knew they did a lot of optimisation, but this seems to reach the compressed levels of that <500B chess engine (BootChess).
To be fair, this is machine code, so it's what, 4-10 bytes for an instruction and two or three of these per line of high level code? So it's probably comparable to a few thousand "pages" of C code.
But it's still pretty amazing.
Of course, density can also be abysmal with current toolchains and practices.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68000#Example_code
It didn't.
As I recall from my brief experiment, you could get a pseudo 50% gray where the corresponding pixels on the two buffers were opposites (one buffer with a black pixel, the other with white).
Which was because the G5 was too power hungry for laptops.
I believe the color NeXTstations were released in 1992.
The original Mac exceeded its target price too.
It is common for the leaders to get the attention, positive or negative, for the results of the groups they lead.
How does HDR affect colors in software? For example, on a 10-bit display - does my "legacy" website showing #FFF, show a true brightest-white color, or would I need to use a special definition to achieve it? Unfortunate, as I'm sure the hex value for a 10-bit 3-tuple is not quite as "perfect" as #000000-#FFFFFF. e.g. like `color: rgbhdr(#0x3FF3FF3FF)`
If I use a non-HDR-aware color-picker app (or take a screenshot), and pick HDR content versus normal content, is there a translation layer that scales down the value to RGB? Or does it clamp and "overexpose"?
It's a whole new world. I googled "HDR in CSS" and got this[0] which is not quite "stubborn programmer who thinks this is a gimmick" friendly...
Anyone have a good resource that explains how one would use HDR colors in practice? And ideally one that touches on considerations like the interactions between HDR-aware and non-HDR-aware applications.
HDR is already here to stay
Since HDR is a superset of the non-HDR color space, I suspect there will be not that much fuss converting 8-bit to 10-bit, but a whole lot of "magic" involved in converting 10-bit down to 8-bit.
[1]: https://netflixtechblog.com/enhancing-the-netflix-ui-experie...
For CSS specifically you can already opt into WCG via color-gamut, but not into HDR yet. I.e. you can have greener greens but not the whitest white.
> which is not quite "stubborn programmer who thinks this is a gimmick" friendly...
Perhaps this draft is more readable. https://drafts.csswg.org/css-color-hdr/
However, there’s Firefox which only supports sRGB, but then displays everything in WCG completely over saturating every single colored pixel on a website [1]. The only way to get your website to look the way you intended it on Firefox is to make the whole thing black and white.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/dloon6/solving_fir...
It's decidedly not a gimmick. However, it not exactly magic either, and to extent it really relies on the effectiveness of your display's local dimming and maximum brightness.
If you're running your display at 50% brightness, then yeah... it's got "more brightness to spare" when it's time to render those extra brighter-than-bright areas.
If you're running your display at max 100% brightness already then... well, there's nowhere to go from there.
I briefly played around with my 2018 iPad Pro, which has an EDR display. I watched the Apple TV movie "Greyhound" with Tom Hanks. That movie appears to have been shot as something of a demo for HDR rendering. Lots of shots inside the dark, cramped ships, with INTENSELY bright light coming in thru the windows.
Watching it on the iPad, the windows were WAY brighter than the rest of the ship interior. But, I could still see everything in the ship interior. It wasn't lost in the shadows. Watching it on my nice Dell IPS monitor, it looked totally different. The portholes were brighter than the ship interior, but not by much. It just looked like a normal movie.
It was a very convincing demo. However, perhaps hilariously, I thought it looked better in non-HDR on my Dell. Nonetheless, it was an impressive tech demo.
The whole "HDR photography" thing from the last 10 years that's so overused in real estate photos is not truly high dynamic range; rather it compresses high dynamic range (often captured with multiple exposures) so it will fit onto ordinary (low) dynamic range displays.
HDR displays are the real deal. Less compression (or maybe even no compression) is needed because the display can show a much wider range of colors natively.
That said, HDR is pointless for the graphical elements of most GUIs. Where it shines is when you're editing photos or movies or viewing them in a window. That window is HDR but outside that window the dynamic range is normal. I saw a link about how Apple is doing this a few weeks ago but can't find it now. It's quite nice as a way to make photos and video really stand out brighter on the screen while letting the GUI elements recede more into the background.
I believe this is the article and HN discussion:
Well it's a step closer but still not enough.
Most pro camera RAW files are 14-bit, though many drop down to 12 or 10 bit in high-speed capture modes.
There are already monitors that simulate 12-bit output from 10-bit input through internal LUTs but the internal pipeline has been stuck at 10-bit for over a decade. Though it was originally the domain of Quadro cards, it's now available from all discrete GPUs.
Technology is still lagging behind what cameras can create let alone what our eyes see.
In reality eyes can adjust the "exposure" on the fly because they recieve all the needed information always. But in a displayed digital image this information is already lost - eyes don't recieve all these bits, the display doesn't send them.
In the editor you can adjust the "exposure" for the RAW files too - they have the needed information - but! - it is not a static image, because you are adjusting it, you are sending continuously different information to the eyes.
Real life has an infinite (practically) dynamic range that is perceived by our eyes with about 20 stops of EV (exposure values or stops). A high-end sensor would capture maybe 12-14 of those. So, at that point you are already making creative choices (e.g. expose for shadows or highlights).
HDR in photography is the notion of combining multiple exposures to recover detail from a wider range of exposure values; which then get compressed down to the EVs of your monitor, which would be something of 8-10 stops typically (maybe more with these new fancy screens). And finally, printed materials have a dynamic range that is far less than that. 4-6 EVs.
High bit rates in raw files (12 or 14 bits are fairly common) means you have more data to work with when compressing values or otherwise manipulating the image data; which is a lossy process that involves rounding errors that can build up. When black and white can be apart by as many as 14 EVs, those extra bits are nice to have as well.
The point of high bitrate displays is more accurate color reproduction. Higher bit rates allow for more smoother gradients between colors. 8 bit color spaces were good enough for displays for a long time. But now that we have displays with higher contrast, deeper blacks, and brighter whites (i.e. a better dynamic range) the few extra bits of precision are useful. Especially on high end screens intended for graphics professionals, this is nice to have.
Of course this only makes sense if the input has a large bitrate as well. Apple is involved in HDR video formats with high bitrate that are getting common on cameras. Also recent beasts like the new Sony Alpa 1 produce 8K video with 10 bits. So that requires some beefy hardware to process, which Apple of course provides. Down-sampling 10 to 8 bits on a monitor is nice to be able to avoid while you are editing; even if your output is going to be lower quality after you finish editing.
None of the above has anything to do with data compression which JPEG does to decrease the number of bits needed to store a file; that's a different concept from DR compression.
Only if you don't plan on printing them or if your audience also has (calibrated) HDR screens.
Is there a way of mastering pictures for "real" HDR--not the fake compressed dynamic range crap, but with the right software switches to "turn on" the magic high dynamic range mode through the OS?
HDR video specifically has a metadata tag that allows the stream to be correctly viewed on your fancy TV by turning on all the right hardware and software "HDR switch"--like increasing max brightness to the set luminance value in the metadata, etc.
For HEIC pictures taken on iPhone, the right switches are turned on in iOS and macOS. Wondering if it's possible to create pictures from my regular sony a7r4 with those metadata tags so it can look cool on fancy displays.
I've literally asked everywhere including my workspace Slack (big company) and nobody knows. The only hack I know that works is making a freaking single-frame HDR video out of the picture file.
Recently (2016) YouTube added support for BT.2020 HDR content such as https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyqf6gJt7KuGArjMwHmgprtDe... - you’ll know it’s an HDR video on YouTube by a red symbol that says HDR over the quality control, or if you turn on Stats for Nerds from settings it says bt.2020 in the text somewhere. Even more recently YouTube added live streaming HDR https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/seeing-believing-launch... which should come in handy now that PS5 supports HDMI 2.1 and HDR, making the 48” LG OLED TV one of the best gaming monitors ever. (But really expensive and kind of big still...)
Unfortunately HDR is backwards compatible, so you have to know your video out and screen are both HDR too. Most flagship OLED cellphones are HDR in P3 colour space if they cost over US$800. Dolby Vision content on Netflix like https://www.netflix.com/title/81017017?s=i&trkid=13747225 would also show off HDR. I can’t seem to find evidence in the Stats for Nerds box on iOS that it is indeed playing back an HDR copy of the video. You could also try this app, but it didn’t seem to detect my iPhone as Dolby Vision capable when it was: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dolby-summit/id1528227248 Oh— one last thing, for best colour reproduction, turn off Night Shift, True Tone and turn the brightness all the way up. That will give you the maximum range of colours your screen supports from the most dim blacks to the brightest reds, greens and blues on an OLED display...
Note that BT2020 describes a wider color gamut, not an extended dynamic range. BT2100 is the HDR equivalent.
> Recommendation ITU-R BT.2100 – Image parameter values for high dynamic range television for use in production and international programme exchange, specifies parameters for High Dynamic Range television (HDR-TV) signals to be used for programme production and international programme exchange. This Report provides background information on HDR in general, and for the perceptual quantization (PQ) and hybrid log-gamma (HLG) HDR signal parameters specified in the Recommendation.
For instance, it confirms what I said elsewhere that 8-bit is mostly fine for consumers to watch HDR:
> The non-linearity employed in legacy television systems (Recommendations ITU-R BT.601, BT.709 and BT.2020) is satisfactory in that 10-bit values are usable in production and 8-bit values are usable for delivery to consumers; this is for pictures with approximately 1 000:1 dynamic range[5], i.e. 0.1 to 100 cd/m2.
> [Footnote 5]: This definition of dynamic range refers to the luminance ratio between the dimmest and brightest possible pixels presented on the display. However quantization artefacts, known as banding, may be visible, particularly in low lights, at luminance levels substantially brighter than the dimmest pixel. Quantization artefacts may, therefore, limit the “effective” dynamic range that is free from banding.
> The PQ HDR system generates content that is optimum for viewing on a reference monitor in a reference viewing environment. The reference monitor would ideally be capable of accurately rendering black levels down to or below 0.005 cd/m2, and highlights up to 10 000 cd/m2. Also, the ideal monitor would be capable of showing the entire colour gamut within the BT.2020 triangle. The viewing environment would ideally be dimly lit, with the area surrounding the monitor being a neutral grey (6 500 degree Kelvin) at a brightness of 5 cd/m2. However, content often must be viewed or produced in environments brighter than the reference condition, and on monitors that cannot display the deepest blacks or brightest highlights that the PQ signal can convey. In these cases the display characteristic needs to be changed in a process often referred to as display mapping (DM).
Some of the most interesting sections of BT.2390 are on the advantages of ICTCP or ITP, for short, which is used by Dolby Vision. Apparently due to “constant intensity” if I’m reading this correctly, YCbCr is less preferred and if possible, RGB (in full 4:4:4) is preferred, or one of the other encodings suggested, like ITP or "Y′CC′BCC′RC". https://professional.dolby.com/siteassets/pdfs/ictcp_dolbywh... might also be relevant here.
Its a bit different because of some of the intricacies of how the new formats are represented. The range is indeed dynamic and that can be exploited to get more precision in a smaller range.
However, calling it HDR is (imo almost purposfully) confusing because of HDR photography which has a lot of other concepts as well as hardware vendors promising the moon.
TV vendors also like to conflate it with brightness or accuracy which are goals for any TV, HDR or not. Brighter whites and blacker blacks is what you are promised but I think its better to think of it as less crushing (greys getting rounded to white and black).
I thought HDR screens actually contained brighter leds to create effects like extremely bright areas in movies and games, and not only 10 bits of resolution but normal brightness?
In software this isn’t any different obviously, but feels like a kind of gamma correction for choosing where on the output brightness scale “normal white” is?
The common scRGB colorspace, often used on windows for games, defines #FFF = 1,1,1 as 200 nits.
But it uses floats instead of integers so you can go much higher. You can also go below black = #000.
10-bit is just added precision in your numbers, and ought to be interpreted as adding more decimal places (makes more sense when you imagine the values going from 0-1 instead of 0-255).
HDR is indicated as a bit somewhere in metadata to tell the downstream components how to interpret the pixel values.
To be extra pedantic, HDR is a bit to indicate how to interpret the brightness (luma) channel. There will be other bits for signaling how to interpret the color channels.
Often these things are all done together, which is generally referred to as HDR10.
Similarly, you can turn on that little High Dynamic Range checkbox and get HDR but only have 16.7 million colours at your disposal because it’s output in 8-bits per colour rather than 10-bits per colour.
And it’s really hard to tell the difference sometimes between 8-bit HDR and 10-bit HDR. Like really hard. Like usually only visible when doing colour grading such that you need every possible nuance of data to more accurately shade and re-colour your pixels. https://youtu.be/MyaGXdnlD6M
Of course I imagine there’s also good vs bad dithering and the output to the attached laptop computer screen is probably better than the multiple cables and adapters required to output to TVs and external displays, but... the easiest way to tell whether something supports billions of colours is to go into monitor preferences and look for 10-bit or 422 or 444. If you see 420 or 8-bit, technically you might still have HDR but you don’t have “billions of colours”, technically.
That's why I played the Spears and Munsil test pattern video with a 8-bit and 10-bit pattern on the same video. The 10-bit pattern was smooth which convinced me that it was outputting 10-bit signal. I also confirmed the TV and monitor I used has a 10-bit panel (not 8-bit + FRC).
> monitor preferences and look for 10-bit or 422 or 444. If you see 420 or 8-bit
I tried the monitor info but didn't find this information. Neither in the TV info. Also Apple hides this information in their System Report.
If you have other tests in mind, I'm happy to test more and get to the bottom of this :)
They used a certified hdmi 2.1 cable to Nvidia 3090, and 3080 should also do it. Not sure if the new consoles are pushing 10bit but they should be.
Can't test it myself yet as my LG CX and Nvidia 3090 are in the mail.
For displays, DisplayHDR provides certification, I'd aim for at least DisplayHDR 1000 for "true" HDR performance
The USB consortium, who else? :)
In coverage of the CIE 1931 color space, the Rec. 2020 color space covers 75.8%, the DCI-P3 digital cinema color space covers 53.6%, the Adobe RGB color space covers 52.1%, and the Rec. 709 color space covers 35.9%.
Technically DCI-P3 as used by projectors isn’t Display P3 as used by computers and smartphones but the numbers should give you an idea.
What you want to look for is high rating for “colour volume” such as https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/picture-quality/color-volume... ... it varies based on LCD vs OLED. Even a fancy LG OLED might only be 87% of the DCI P3 colour space due to missing out on the brightest whites but absolutely nailing the darkest blacks in low light viewing.
I sure has hell can't tell the difference between an image with 16M colors and 16M^4 colors, so sometimes I think the above is the only reason why it exists or will be used when it's prevalent. But I'm older so maybe my vision simply isn't as good.
I would basically run a macro which cycle through the resolutions from b/w, 4 colors, 16, 256, ... and up to a million or so. I think there is a name for this, but basically watching a prism of rainbow colors. At a million+ the color tones are very smooth and you don't see an outline.
I could not imagine I would be able to differentiate a billion colors from its previous factor. At that point, I would stamp it and it goes off to shipping for packaging, and to the customers.
Edit: link https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/reviews/graphics-beginners,1...
I used to work as a hardware technician in a local computer shop as a summer / weekend job back then. I installed dozens of 4mb Cirrus Logic PCI graphics cards when building PCs.
The motherboard multiple ISA and 1 PCI slot if I recall right. In fact I was testing VGA and also sound cards on the ISA slot. So checking sound and playing some mpeg video file.
I can maybe write up a short post about this if anyone would be interested more.
At home, away from work, I owned a mac which was running the power pc processor. And that was also 25 mhz. What I remember was how everything seemed integrated (e.g. not upgradable. Young me could not understand why there was no graphics card. I could only upgrade here the hard drive, or simm memory)
Now cards have more RAM than I had disk.
Now CPUs have more L2/L3 cache than I had disk!
Additionally wider color gamuts also mean that each quantization step would cover a larger absolute difference if we kept things at 8bpc.
It's called seizure test, aka intermittent photic stimulation ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_photic_stimulatio...
7 bit color would also count as "millions of colors", but I don't remember any GPU ever offering it as a display mode.
Is this one of them?
mb is short for millibit, the abbreviation for megabyte is MB (or MiB if you mean 2^20 bytes). I know it's a minor thing, but "m" and "M" does not mean the same thing, neither does "b" and "B", and they're mixed up too often.
Sorry for the off topic.
He was going crazy over a file being shown as 600Mb on Windows and 629Mb on mac. When he compared the bytes values, they were the same (around 629,145,600 bytes) and that settled it.
I believe the reason is that all storage devices are marketed in decimal sizes anyway.
My MacBook Pro's internal "1 TB" disk is actually 1,000,240,963,584 bytes -- neither 1 TB nor 1 TiB.
To be fair: It make sense to measure RAM in MiB, because it is addressed by binary address lines so you always end up with a power of two.
Files are, however, as big as somebody decided to write into them (modulo some rounding to the next sector, depending on file system implementation details). It does not make much sense to measure them in MiB. Quite often it just more confusing to calculate file sizes in MiB instead of MB. I dont even know why Microsoft stated that MiB business.
Similar with hard disks by the way. They contain as many sectors as the manufacturer was able to put on them. There is no power of two involved.
No, they're not. Sure, in more familiar scenarios where you're measuring the size of some amount of data it's an integer, but there's nothing mathematically wrong with having a not-integer number of bits.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_(unit)
If you do any sort of calculations with information theory you're quite likely to end up with a non-integer number of bits, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Just because physical hardware is more or less restricted to integer bit quantities doesn't mean fractional bits aren't a useful concept.
Dark scenes on a OLED might look better since your eyes can adjust to low light.
640px x 480x x 3 bytes per channel = ~1MB. So yeah, 4-8MB is about right for a VGA card.
VGA came with 256 kB RAM onboard. Then, in the early 90's, SVGA came with 512 kB and 1 MB onboard, and it could do 800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x1024. The main RAM would be around 4 MB for the midrange computer. It took until mid-90, that you could get 4 or 8 MB SVGA, that could also do hicolor and truecolor.
Darker single color gradients exhibit very strongly noticeable color stairs. Tried to generate one for a background, locked horrible. It only looked good once I randomized the gradients a bit, i.e., even with 8 bit colors, you might need dithering.
Similar effects can be noticed in relatively dark photos of scenes with gradients, e.g., a sky.
Of course my experience is only 1 test point...
Yes, if you actually compare a 10-bit and an 8-bit panel next to another, it's immediately obvious.
Here's a photo of a 6-bit, 10-bit and 8-bit gradient on a native 10-bit panel without any dithering (Dell UP2718Q): https://i.k8r.eu/VolYbQ.png
Running on a Dell UP2718Q, in HDR10 mode.
That said, in person can be – depending on environmental lighting conditions – much more subtle. The test here was done with blinds closed in a mostly dark room.
In bright environments 8-bit is enough, and 6-bit with dithering can be close, but in dark environments (such as when watching a movie or gaming) you'll even notice banding in 10-bit content.
that's neat that someone else does that.
i'm like that with the voodoo2, for some unknown reason.
don't get me wrong, the voodoo2 was great, but i'm not sure why it stuck in my head for that long.
Same goes for some symbols like 386 dx2. Our young brain were imprinted hard.
My first thought was "yeah, that makes sense" but my second was "what could it possibly mean when we talk about a 68000 being 'fast' in 2021?!"
It really made me think about how an attribute like "fastness" can get endowed and then still stick 40 years later, almost as though it were describing some spiritual attribute that transcends the fact that a modern $0.25 microcontroller is many times more performant.
Wikipedia agrees with that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Graphics_Array), but adds “The 640×480 16-color and 320×200 256-color modes had fully redefinable palettes, with each entry selected from an 18-bit (262,144-color) gamut.”. That, I don’t remember knowing, even reading that.
So, a quarter of a million, but only 256 at a time. I think the Macintosh II, doing 256 colors out of 16.7 million, looked better, especially with a Trinitron display (https://everymac.com/monitors/apple/classic_monitors/specs/a...).
Um, no, we had TVs for quite a while before it got any colors, in the beginning it was all gray scale.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3021327/the-addams-familys-livin...
EDIT: Not the Addams family part, though. That’s new to me!
Maybe some of the later decoder chips in the late 80s and onward operated digitally but haven’t looked into it too much.
The history of colour television dates back to the mechanical era - with the first practical unit being demonstrated the same year as the first television station launched in America. Further, the first practical all-electronic colour television was developed in 1944, long before mass adoption of the technology. Finally, by the time television adoption began in earnest (1948), the FCC was developing a standard for colour television transmission.
So while it's true that for many years televisions displays lacked colour, they would have still been judged by their absence of colour by a population well aware of coming advancement.
Not even close. Black-and-white TV was the default for decades. Almost nobody judged televisions by their lack of color because hardly anyone beyond those who subscribed to Popular Mechanics even knew that color was a possibility.
The 1948 date is meaningless. Most American households didn't have a color TV until the very late 1960's, or even into the 1970's. TV stations didn't broadcast in color until the late 1960's, and even then most of the programs were in black and white. I remember when color TV broadcasts first became possible and the TV networks crowing before each color show "In color!" the way they did "In stereo (where available)!" in the 1990's.
When color TVs did become well-known and started becoming common, it was usually the parent's bedroom or the living room that had the big color TV, and all the remaining televisions in the house were back-and-white.
Personally, I didn't have a color TV until 1983, and that was only to use as a computer monitor.
If they are talking about the laptops, it should be that the Laptops/laptop displays supports billions of colors.
Is't the chip SoC and so includes the graphics hardware? Doesn't that bit have to support the colours?
(I can't find an example model that had displayport, but I can find earlier models that did.)
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201218041928/https://support.a...
(I wish I could link the study, but I found it during the peak of my 2012-era graphics career. Suffice to say, more devs should study the science of perceptual testing.)
The reasons why are interesting, but it has to do with how the eye processes images and color.
Remember, you can turn your screen as bright as you want. But it doesn't help the content appear more "real" or "better" or "HDR-like". Therefore, HDR is simply "the ability to discern between different levels of color." And if you try to measure exactly how many levels of color a human can discern, the answer is no more than the 256^3 available via 8-bit RGB.
The precise claim: if you have two screens next to each other, one 8-bit RGB and one 10-bit RGB, and both screens are color calibrated / brightness calibrated identically, and the viewing conditions are identical for both screens, then if you blindfold someone and put them in front of a random screen, they will be unable to say "Ah, this is the 10-bit RGB screen!" more than random chance.
10-bit also comes with much better calibration precision where the translation isn't done in the display itself.
I didn't say to turn down the brightness of the HDR screen. I said the brightness per area must match.
Using maximum brightness often harms color reproducibility too, by the way. So if you believe brighter = better, don't.
But that’s not what HDR is. 8bpc is definitely not enough to represent HDR Rec.2020 or DCI-P3 without significant banding.
Because 8 vs 10 bit colour in sky photography is quite obvious
There must also be limits to perception or resolution. Are our eyes even able to tell the difference between FHD, 2K and 4K on a 15" screen?
I tested FHD vs 4K on a 31" screen and could not are a difference when watching a 10 minute video (I had 2 screens side by side for reference).
On a semi related note. I also tried watching 60fps videos at 60Hz vs 144Hz (again side by side) to test out my new screen. No difference. Even fast moving things.
I really feel like either I just don't perceive these things and it'll keep more money in my wallet, or that I'm not alone and everybody can save money. A chart of when differences actually become perceptible would be great. It wouldn't surprise me I'd the threshold for 4K were 42", 10bit only in grays and fps at a certain pixel per second movement speed.
Coincidentally in a YUV encoding I'd only push the V axis to 10 bit - maybe even 12 to cover extra HDR range, i.e. higher absolute brightness when the display supports it. (Or go with a logarithmic encoding, in which case even 8 bit might be enough...)
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Formats/V...
> Additionally, in saturated portions of the image (that is, where colors are pure and intense, such as a bright, pure red [rgba(255, 0, 0, 1)]), color depths below 10 bits per component (10-bit color) allow banding, where gradients cannot be represented without visible stepping of the colors.
Info on banding: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Formats/V...
TLDR; If you display something and thats it, 8 bits is enough (generally). Start feeding it through mathematical functions you need more precision otherwise error compounds.
But for image editing, 16-bit integers or single-precision floats are certainly helpful.
And for HDR and wide-gamut images, 8 bits gets a bit limiting.
Still in that case if you wanting to dither you gradient you better be working in a higher precision format.
Anyways, please notice I said: "8 bits is enough (generally)". There is a reason I said generally, I did not say always.
-Edit-
Although, lossy compression may effectively linearize gradients from video or photographs. Consider an extremely simple example: A compression algorithm that detects/fits to a gradual gradients to much smaller delta encoding. Such as increase the channel value by 1 every pixel for a 100 pixels. While this might be rather simple example. It's obvious to see how that would remove noise and make that section of an image highly linear.
What Apple does is assemble it all in a base model, like a console, so that all models have the feature set as base. And like other commenters have pointed out, PCs with HDR have been shipping long before, especially "workstation" machines.
Seems like it will take time for this all to shake out.
Anyone else remember the early days when you could actually choose 32bit colour in system preferences?
Drives me crazy that it’s taken this long to get back to unbanded gradients.
This is done by physically increasing the backlight brightness and dimming the LCD around the video content to keep UI brightness levels consistent. The UI bit depth actually decreases once EDR kicks in.
In particular the Viewsonic XB2779QQS-S1... (
I find the reaction to the M1 pretty funny. People are impressed by the silliest things.
If not, I'm going to block it from my network. I don't care for another opaque algorithm controlling my information. It's not like I'd miss out on much intelligent discussion...
> How are stories ranked?
> The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.
> Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
You're unlikely to get a more detailed answer as it can lead to (more) of the system.