MacBook Pro, Thousands of Colors
mantia.me
mantia.me
Here's where I stopped reading. I, too, would like a pony.
They don't owe you anything beyond a refund.
Then again, I think the whole MBP line has had 6 bit displays for their whole history, so I'm not sure why he's complaining now.
If the entire MBP line has 6 bit displays, then why complain?
I am a bit concerned of Apple's false advertising though. So my 2006-ish 17 Macbook Pro is not able to display millions of colors? That is sad...
I have a 2007ish 15" MBP, and it dithers/FRC's like a mofo with certain colors in WinXP.
Just because the status quo is such it doesn't mean it is good and cannot be improved. I was searching for a quality LCD screen lately and I couldn't find a reasonable 8-bit screen at any shop, just 6-bit. I read a lot of reviews from seemingly professional sites and they all say the same thing: 8-bit MVA, PVA or IPS panel types are much much better than 6-bit TN at anything except price and maybe a bit of extra latency (not important for anyone except hardcore FPS gamers). The sad state of affairs is that all the reasonably priced 8-bit screens I wanted were out of stock for an unknown period of time at all shops (like the HP LP2475w) or out of production for good. It seems I'll have to pick the best of the worst and be happy just because everybody has the same.
When your product is theoretically a pro product aimed as such and is pretty expensive to begin with you expect the best quality out of all the components. I own a PowerBook Pro and this thing is amazing. More than 5 years old and and everthing works perfectly except some scratches on the metal surface due to drops from heights. The screen in it is the best I ever saw, even compared to new expensive Dells, HPs and others I saw at friends and colleagues. It will be a sad day when I have to change it with a MacBook Pro and the screen will be worse.
Sure, he's asking for a pony in some ways, but they're making pro machines with displays that don't do what they say or anything "pro" for that matter.
The author makes a point that it's hard to believe an extremely well-regarded company like Apple would fail to disclose the true color depth of their panels or that the millions of colors are generated by dithering rather than the native capability of the monitor. I do agree though that his article was rather long for the point he made. There was some entertainment value in the length but it was not value a typical HN reader would seek
Actually, as he explained in the article, he made the decision based on specs, and weight.
There was no way of knowing exactly which display was used without access to a MacBook Pro because that's not information made public by Apple, either. It's an awfully roundabout way of finding out how many colors can be displayed.
In hindsight it's easy to say he could have done the research ahead of time, but think about this: 1) It's called a MacBook Pro and is marketed at more demanding users, i.e. professionals, 2) Apple advertises it as being able to display millions of colors despite the fact that it really only displays 262,144. Under those circumstances, it's probably easy to take a look at the specs on the Apple site and feel confident that it's the right product.
There's still the matter of Apple refusing to disclose which of its products do, in fact, display millions of colors as advertised. At least they offered him a refund in the end, but in my opinion the whole thing sucks. I don't have a problem paying more and getting my money's worth, but they're clearly skimping on parts for products directly targeting the most demanding users.
A class action law suit about this issue was filed last year, it's not exactly breaking news.
Which "professionals"? 8bit color is important to pretty much one professional group: graphic artists/designers (maybe two, if you include people doing video work). For the vast majority of people - "professional" or otherwise - 6bit vs. 8bit color doesn't matter. It looks good, it's fast, it runs what they want. Those are the things that matter.
As a developer, I consider myself a "professional", and my life is fine with 6bit color. My roommate is a screenwriting "professional" and they're fine with 6bit color. Presumably an 8bit color display would cost more, and hence would reduce the number of people who could afford the machine, at the expense of pleasing one small market segment.
Bottom line is that if a feature (any feature) was important enough for me that it would make or break my decision to buy the underlying system, I'd explicitly confirm its existence (in a way more rigorous than "millions and millions", which sounds like marketing-speak), and I'd get reviews from my peers who would have the same interests. In this case, the author did neither.
(This is 6 bits per channel, not 6 bits per pixel, by the way.)
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.
When you use dithering/pixel tricks to fake color depth, everything turns slightly fuzzy and washed out. Even black is affected. It really begins to affect the way things look and feel on the screen.
I do agree with the sentiment that it is disingenuous of Apple (and almost everyone else in the industry) not to list the bit depth of their displays, though.
A 6-bit display is capable of displaying more than 6 bits of color information, using a technique named temporal dithering. For an example, open this image on a 6-bit display: < http://imgur.com/BeVicl.png >. If the display could only display 262k colors, the squares would look identical.
(Well, assuming one is comparing on a true 8 bit screen.)
This is not clear at all. Every manufacturer uses 6-bit displays, even in most if not all high-end models. This has been true for years. They choose to do so because such displays have desirable properties other than color, such as price and lower response times.
I say write the letter and address it to Steve Jobs. See what happens. It's worth a shot.
Once consumers will see real "262K colors" stickers on their laptops, who knows maybe we'll get back our FlexView screens on Thinkpads.
Viewing angles and contrast ratios are shrinking as well, hence the disgusting proliferation of contrast-enhancing glass/film panel covers: it's like forcing every customer to wear permanent sunglasses: just because your panel is junk.
I bought 2 CRTs half a year ago, for me and my brother. They were 21" Sony E530, mnf. 2001-2002 Not the top models (F520/G520 are better, and there is also 24" widescreen Sony FW900) but I was not willing to hunt for the better ones, those were quite fine for us. I think of buying 2 more 21" CRTs for the country house.
Yes, there is. The HP Elitebook 8730W can be ordered with the a DreamColor 8-bit IPS (or PVA not sure...) LCD panel. And Lenovo used to ship the T-series line with IPS panels. I think the W700 can also be ordered with a IPS WUXGA panel.
http://www.sony.com.sg/microsite/vaio/products/vaio_tt/8bit....
The reason the quality has been (and is) receding is because manufacturers have noticed that most people can't tell the difference between e.g. TN and IPS displays, so they produce the former, which are much cheaper. And better options are being phased out all the time; the two LCDs I have were phased out within a couple years. An S-IPS panel now costs at least $100 more than a same-size TN panel, and usually at much lower advertised contrast ratios, which further puts off consumers. Pretty much the only people who buy the good stuff now know their stuff, and we pay a premium because of it.
Since all colors on a LCD screen are dithered between red, green, and blue anyway, and the human eye has no trouble handling that, the question is whether a higher level dithering would be similarly undetectable.
It sounds like he was happy with it until he took it apart. If you only discover it's not good enough after checking the part number, I think maybe it is good enough.
Anyway, is there a picture somewhere I can download that will show me how awful my shitty 6 bit screen is? I've been skeptical of "I can see/hear more pixels/sin waves than you" before, but I've also seen compelling proof for some of it.
PS: Why is it 6 and 8 bit, not 18 and 24? It makes me think you're a retard for thinking 8 bits is enough for 16 million colors, but that seems to be how everyone labels it.
Note that an image that uses 6-bit color with an alpha channel will have 24 bits per pixel, which shouldn't be confused with the 32 bites per pixel of 8-bit color.
My Asus G1 has an incredibly good screen--very high-contrast, a near-perfect viewing angle: I can read text as far as 80 degrees to the side or top, where 90 means unable to see any of the screen. It's high-DPI (1680x1050 on a 15.4") as well. Odds are it's a 6-bit TN, and all the research I've done suggests that. But it's amazing despite that.
My company gave me a Thinkpad for personal use. It has a similar size screen. The contrast is abominable; the screen is bright gray when it's black and no matter how much I adjust contrast/brightness I can't make it usable. The viewing angle is atrocious. And yet from what I can tell... it's also a 6-bit TN.
Bits are, IMO, one of the less important problems in LCD panels these days; the overall quality as a whole is suffering greatly in new screens.
I had no idea about this, and that's the most dishonest piece of marketing from a reputable company I've heard in a long time.
The screen on the thing is a piece of dung. Gradients look terrible.
My acer travelmate from the days of the dinosaurs even has a better screen.
I enjoyed reading about this guys little quest and it's one of the reasons I prefer to keep my distance from Apple.
I have no idea why the "demanding" Apple audience let's them get away with that but the panels on these things have always had lower contrast and (sometimes ridiculously) lower viewing angles than comparable notebooks, e.g. the sony vaios.
I've done plenty side-by-side comparisons and both problems are fairly obvious even to the untrained eye. For example the RGB color #fefefe is generally indistinguishable from white on MacBook displays. Some of our designers refer to them as WashyBooks and spend time to make sure their palettes are "WashyBook safe".
Still, since you already knew about 6-bit vs 8-bit issues, why did you not look in the store before buying? The dithering is visible to the careful eye just by looking for it on my 13" Macbook (white, plastic, relatively cheap).
Edit: Why all the drive-by downvoting? This is true to the best of my knowledge.
"Colour accuracy in the three MacBook Pro displays is as right as we've seen in a laptop display, equal to or better than some midrange desktop displays and not that far off the level of colour correctness found in a premium desktop display."
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=7-10041-...
(Unless I'm confused here, which is entirely possible.)
-- performing color matching against a sample - fabric, print, etc -- soft-proofing for print output (spot colors) -- when performing any color/contrast adjustments on photographs or art that have fine color/value gradients. A common example is a grey sweep backdrop--zoom in past a certain point and you can see visible banding
That said, anyone doing prepress on a laptop is stupid. Get thee to a color booth and a 10-bit LUT Eizo (or even better to your cache of discontinued Sony Artisans you keep in a closet somewhere and replace as they age).
The fact that, to a first approximation, one can no longer buy a laptop with an LCD of the same quality as those made 10 years ago - at any price - is disturbing all in itself, and suggests that technology is marching backwards. What's next, the abolition of 44.1KHz audio?
Compare a 1980s keyboard to a modern one. It is entirely conceivable that the UI technology we will be using in a decade or two will be of such abominable quality that one might be ashamed to design it into a children's toy computer today.
Actually, it's funny that you pose that question in this article. I think MP3s are a great example of "44.1KHz" audio that is not the fidelity of what you're probably thinking of, the CD-Audio standard.
People are clearly prioritizing things other than the sheer quality of the material, be it visual or audio. I think it's impressive that the LCD folks have been able to engineer LCDs at the prices they have. And, much like MP3s shrunk music file sizes by throwing away parts of the music that people aren't supposed to miss, the LCD guys are throwing away quality that, apparently, people don't care about either.
The problem is that a substantial minority does care about quality - and we are left out in the cold. Have you ever priced a "specialist" monitor? That is where all non-lowest-common-denominator user interface technology seems to be headed - squarely outside the budget of the individual. And as we can see from the article, it has become entirely impossible to purchase a new laptop with both a decent screen and a decent operating system.
But I agree with the other comment, on a laptop I care more about things looking nice, ie no dither or banding, rather than about accurate color reproduction.
I have multiple monitors, but the only one that I knew was 8-bit (a high end Viewsonic intended for designers, and from a time when specs were easy to find and very clear and generally accurate, at least on high end devices) has long since left the stable as it was only 19". I'm certain the differences are subtle, as they are in good consumer speakers vs. good studio monitors. But, it'd be nice to know if what I'm working with is altering my perception of things. Particularly as I've just done several thousand dollars worth of design work for print on my new laptop which may or may not have an accurate display. It's just nice to know what I'm dealing with is all.
I have 6-bit, but it's also higher res. Dithering is less of a problem in that scenario. But having seen it clearly, now I understand why you shouldn't do video-intensive work on this sort of display.
Moreover, different batches have different monitors.
Manufacturers keep lowering prices (remember how much the Powerbooks did cost?) so they must use cheaper technology, and most people are mostly ignorant about specs anyway.
Glossy screens are another example (they're cheaper to make and they look better at first sight).
It's funny to hear some of these guys talk about how they buy the MacBook Pro over the MacBook because of the 6-bit vs 8-bit panel when all of those laptops have only ever had 6-bit panels in them. The Pro just happens to use a better quality panel, that's all. But it's still 6-bit.
As a side note - this is why I love HN - I remember the class action lawsuit over colors and Apple a few years ago (or at least discussion around it) - but I didn't know what it was over. Now I have insight into the differences in LCD color qualities and get the insight that the 13" MacBook pro isn't _really_ totally Pro.
They've offered you a refund. Take the money and use it to buy the 15" MacBook with a better screen. And this time try checking out the product to make sure it meets your needs before splashing down thousands of dollars.
EDIT: and as a side quest, he is trying to get them to admit that their pro product doesn't have pro specs.
"Whether you’re a designer, photographer, or any kind of creative pro who deals with visual material, you face the daunting task of getting your colors just right. [...] Learn how you can make the most of your Mac to maximize the effectiveness of your colors."
He's simply wants the TRUE specs on the machine.
He can either A) do a google search (which indicates that yes, the 15" does have 8-bit color) or B) Give up on Apple and get a different brand/OS
Translation: I am unhappy that Apple made a business decision to use a cheaper component that won't affect most users of the machine, but negatively affects my particular use of it.
More broadly, in this day and age I'd also be skeptical of the author's notion that the word "Pro" means it's explicitly designed for "professionals" as opposed to normal people. Look at most advertising - the word has come to mean nothing more than high-end consumer grade. For the most part, if something is made explicitly for professionals in a certain field it will rely on industry-specific promotions/reviews and knowledge to make itself known, as opposed to outright advertising. This is similar to the frequent use of the word "exclusive" in reference to availability - if it was really exclusive, it wouldn't be advertised.
And even if I'm wrong about those two points, when did "professional" come to mean "digital art professional"?
For playback purposes (DVDs, games, etc), most consumers won't notice the difference. For content creation, though, 6-bit panels are a disaster. I've seen cheap panels from Dell that simply could not display colours in the light blue or light yellow range correctly, and light greys not at all.
Wikipedia has an excellent article about the different types of LCD panels available, but the takeaway is basically "you get what you pay for."
He has a 30 inch cinema display that he can now use for designing and checking colors with the replacement cable but he still would rather rant and rave and call support hours on end rather than just replace the laptop.
Cheap monitors are bad in many different ways. One cannot predict exactly how it will diverge from what it ought to look like. So, if your source has been designed on a device that is accurate and balanced, you have a dramatically higher chance of it looking or sounding good on the majority of devices.
I think it's a valid criticism of Apple. It is information that is valuable to consumers who work in the design field, and it's information that I would expect to find on the "Tech Specs" section of their site. The fact that they don't provide that information, for quite pricey machines intended for "professional" users, makes me very much less likely to buy their products. But, then again, I'm generally surprised that anyone puts up with the abuse that Apple inflicts on their customers.
Imagine if the guy responsible for developing new recipes for McDonalds insists that his "creative work" only be done with organic Niman ranch beef.
Seriously?
I hope you're not a designer, videographer, photographer, or recording engineer.
Imagine if the guy responsible for developing new recipes for McDonalds insists that his "creative work" only be done with organic Niman ranch beef.
The point. You missed it. You're not even close. It's way over there.
The monitor is the measuring cups, not the ingredients.
I think the real advantage is people get used to how their system adjusts music. So by following the convention it's going to sound "normal" to them.
For example, many hifi and computer speakers come with some kind of bass boost. If I edit something using speakers like that there will be little or no bass on speakers which don't have that 'feature'. Or if I go in the other direction and finish on speakers that sound rather thin, the result will be an unmerciful honking noise on anything with a bass boost. Using a pair of (moderately) expensive speakers means I can split the difference, and know that while it will never sound as good as I'd like on consumer speakers, it will never sound too awful either.
If you still don't think it matters, watch some short films or videos on YouTube. Then take even a modest Hollywood movie and notice how vastly, enormously better it sounds. Obsessing over sound and color seems trivial to those who don't have to work on content, but the very fact that most people take these things for granted is what fuels that obsession: because people are so sensitive they notice very quickly if the quality is off, even if they can't articulate why.
I've never understood this, myself. If it was mixed on monitors, and made to sound good on monitors, then shouldn't it sound best when replayed on monitors?
If I mix on a set of accurate studio monitors (and assuming a reasonable level of skill in the area), the sound will be pretty well balanced across any number of speakers. Some will be hyped (smiley curve EQ), some will be bassy, and some will be bright. But a balanced mix will be pretty well-balanced on any set of speakers of reasonable quality. If I mix on speakers that lead me to boost or lower a specific set of frequencies, the speakers that do the opposite will be twice as far off as if I had mixed to a balanced set of speakers.
Everybody here is probably pretty mathematical, so think of a single sine wave at a specific frequency. Say I'm aiming for an amplitude of 1 (units irrelevant). My mixing speaker boosts it by .5, because it's a speaker aimed at guys who like their cars to rattle. So, now I've mixed this sine wave at an amplitude of .66. If someone who likes bright sounding music (and with speakers that drop the bass by .5) listens, my mix now has the bass at .33 (ignoring all the dB math, and the crazy physics of ears/distance/frequencies etc. for the sake of simplicity).
If, on the other hand, I mixed on a speaker that accurately gave me a 1 when I wanted a 1, it'll play at 1.5 on the bass-heavy speakers, and at .5 on the treble-heavy speakers. Smaller differences are better.
Note also that professional studios also tend to include a few sets of speakers. You mix on the "mains" which are usually high quality near-field monitors, and you test on the small and big speakers and possibly a specific set of speakers that matches your target audience. Good engineers also usually live and breathe their projects, and so they'll also listen in the car on the way home and to work in the morning. The main work of mixing, however, always happens on a good, accurate set of monitors. If it doesn't, odds are very good it'll sound like crap on a good portion of speakers.
And to answer this questions specifically:
then shouldn't it sound best when replayed on monitors?
Sure, but how many people have $1000+ speaker/amp combos in their car, iPod, home, etc.? The problem is merely one of making the best mix for the most people. If you know exactly what speakers your customer is using, and those are the only speakers that will be used for playback of your recording, then you would obviously tune your mix for that exact set of speakers. But, that's pretty much never the case. We do the best we can with a complex set of variables.
As you note, consumer speakers (at most price points under the obscenely expensive mark) tend to hype certain frequencies: bass and highs in particular. Folks hear it and think, "Wow, so bright and clear! And dig that bass! You can really feel it." Studio monitors do none of those things, on purpose. The job of studio monitors is not to lure a consumer at Best Buy into thinking this set of speakers is better because it is louder and brighter in a room full of noise. Their job is to accurately reflect what is on tape.
So, engineers very rarely talk about whether monitors sound "good". The word engineers use as praise is "accurate". And, when they do use the word "good" in this context, they usually mean "accurate", where someone else probably means "hyped".
They're the best investment I've ever made, but I'm just a music-enthusiast. I was roughly aware of the issues you brought up, and it was a very good and thorough explanation.
I guess I just wanted to point out that there are even "normal people" out there who appreciate accuracy/quality in speakers.
It's important to know that anyone can benefit from using studio monitors for listening to music. They reproduce music in such a lovely way - accurate, detailed and pleasant. Listen to your favourite music, but in a new way. Discover things you didn't know were there.
Even - shall we say, despite the accuracy - there's plenty of bass to go around, and your studio monitors can put out insane levels of volume and still reproduce everything beautifully.
Folks are always amazed by the audio in my living room...it doubles as my office and home studio, and I have an obscenely overpowered Hafler amplifier driving a pair of Tannoy System 600 speakers. Those little speakers can shake the house, and they do it while being really precise and clear. I also have bass traps in all the corners and have made more than a passing attempt to make the room balanced and non-reactive, which is something most music consumers have never experienced (a good sounding room is at least as important as the speakers you put in it). It's still not exactly a studio experience, but it's pretty awesome for Rock Band Taco Night. I also just bought a projector and an 80" diagonal screen for our booth at OSCON next week...Rock Band Taco Night will never be the same.
Right. This is what I keep telling anyone who's interested. Of course, most people are blissfully oblivious to quality (wrt. lots of things)
My speakers are powered though. I'd have no idea what kind of amp to get.
> Magic cables that cost hundreds of dollars
A timeless classic :) Some time last year, I was investigating headphones, and came across a pair of Grados at some shop.
I mentioned that the earpieces felt abrasive, and the "helpful" shop owner suggested I buy a pair of thicker, fluffier ones for around 50 euros. Yes, 50 euros for two pieces of foam or whatever. "THIS.. IS.. FINLAND!!"
He claimed, with a straight face, that the headphones would sound better with the thicker earpieces too, "because they're shaped to better direct sound into your ears" .. :P
> a good sounding room is at least as important as the speakers you put in it
This is particularly unfortunate for me, since I live in a crummy apartment with concrete walls. There's not much I can do about acoustics, short of a considerable (and very costly) renovation.
I bet your Rock Band Taco Nights are awesome :)
By the way, what kind of headphones would you recommend? I'm leaning towards Beyerdynamic DT880(PRO?)'s.
I think they're about 1/2 to 1/3 the price of those Beyerdynamics, too.
I think where people get confused here is the naive dithering where a group of 3 pixels (one of each color) are logically grouped together gives your the 252k and 16m numbers, but there is no reason that is the only desirable solution.
Consider sub-pixel rendering of typography. This abandons the traditional groups of 3 pixels and uses alternatives to gain better horizontal spatial resolution. Consider a white, lowercase 'L'. Depending where it appears on my screen it could either be a single white pixel under the naive "groups of three" dithering, or a yellow pixel next to a blue pixel. The catch is that unless I show you the borders of the screen you can't tell which it is.
Fortunately, I have a brand new 15" MacBook Pro under my fingers. Tonight when it gets dark I'll take a picture of a gradient, enlarge it beyond the capabilities of my eyes, and we will have an answer about what Apple does.
That rules out a naive 6 bit display. I think. The application of color profiles can could cause some regions of to have one-to-one mapping even if there aren't enough output codes available to cover the inputs, but I think with the 4:1 difference I can rule that out.
It will make a table with cells whose text is just slightly off of the background. You can stare are them and explore the limits of your visual system and your computer's display. (No one will be able to see all of the text on any statically adjusted display.)
Additionally, on this MacBook Pro I looked at a greyscale gradient which I have used over the past and decided it was poorly distributed, so I ran through the color calibration (expert mode) in the Displays preferences pane. I ended up with a much better distributed gradient, but I introduced hue distortion so I didn't keep it. But there seems to be room for an improved profile.
2. Even ignoring this, your numbers are still wrong. 2^6 = 64, and 2^8 = 256.
2^6 = 64, but I have red, green, and blue pixels, so times three, but subtract two because all the blacks are the same.
I suppose I'll need to write a small article on this with some pictures. In the process of researching this I was impressed with how useless macrophotography of a screen was. Small changes that are obvious to the human at a distance are invisible when looking at the individual r,g,b elements up close.
I'm away from my camera that can output RAW data, maybe with it and some numerical image analysis I can tell if there is multipixel dithering going on, but my human eye isn't going to tell, even from magnified pictures.