Apple sued over 6-bit LCD panels

[postmortemIA]

The customers claim that dithering doesn't result in millions of colors, but a deception.

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Nowadays LCD makers claim without any hesitation that everything is 16.7 mil panel.

 

[Auric]

Yeah, and so-called "motion pictures" and video in general are nothing but a glorified flip book of still pictures. So what? The important thing is whether the desired effect/perception is achieved, not how.

That said, the native colour capability should be stated, rather than a vague description but then it prolly was in the product specs. So, this seems quite frivolous.

Just suppose there was an advertisement for a video player which vaguely stated "fast frame-rate". Well, wouldn't that prompt you even more than usual to investigate the specs before making a purchase? It would me.

 

[lopri]

What would be the definition of "millions" in legal term? Is it <over '1,000,000'> or <'2,000,000' or greater>? And does apple's LCD deliver the number of colors by the said definition? I never thought things like this is hard to tell. Especially with numbers. "Intel Pentium 4 3.8GHz" is a 3.8GHz part, not 3.6GHz part. I am not familiar with how colors are counted on LCD but I assume there are more technical people who know how many colors the said LCD can generate? Of course "millions" can be somewhat vague, but I'd say it shouldn't be less then one million. If it's less than a million, there definitely is a case.

 

[Captante]

As far as I know all 6-bit panels are really 16.2 million colors, not 16.7 & dithering doesn't make for the missing 500k ... I've certainly been able to see the difference in comparisions I've done personally.

 

[nonameo]

Dithering is just as valid as having red green and blue pixels sitting next to eachother. That guy needs to STFU.

 

[xtknight]

6-bit panels can really only display 262,144 colors. FRC (temporal, frame rate control) and dithering (spatial/grid) techniques bring it up to 16.2M colors. With dithering, 253 shades can be mixed using 3 adjacent pixels; 253^3 = 16,194,277. Hi-FRC (dynamic range expansion->9-bit), developed by CMO brings that back up to 16.7M colors. Whitepaper: http://www.unionen.se/pub/swec/Hi-FRC.pdf

Anyone expecting to do photo editing on a MacBook laptop needs to be shot anyway. If the MacBooks use TN (mine at school certainly does), they are already worthless for photo editing. It is not substandard for a laptop to have 262K displayable colors. Consider some of the Lenovo ThinkPad laptops with IPS panels instead and you will be glad. If they're going to sue people for using 6-bit panels, sue the desktop monitor manufacturers! We barely have any 8-bit desktop monitors.

 

[n7]

Macbooks use TNs.

Macbook Pros use IPS.

Edit: just checked ours at work; i was wrong.

The Macbook Pro is using a TN also...