lcd color quality

[mrweirdo]

I was just at best buy playing around with apples ibook G4 800mhz comps they have there and I came to the conclusion that the LCD apple use dont seem to have quite to color range depth and sharpness of the pc laptop they have there in store mostly hp, sony, etc. This seemed to apply to the all the other apple products with LCDs they had as well. I spent a good 10 minutes or so playing around with the display settings on the ibook changing brightness color depth, adjusting the screen around for beter viewing angles, etc and still couldnt quite get the color to look as good as all the pcs did by default. I'm not sure if this is a common thing or what like if apple uses cheaper lcds that others but I would have thought it would be the otherway around as apple has been particarly good with photoshop and other graphical work.

Has anyone else noticed this in best buy or even other stores?

 

[PlantATree]

Where do you live that they sell iBooks in Best Buy? The only Apple products they carry at Best Buys around my house are iPods. Very interesting.

 

[mrweirdo]

Sacramento California area. Both the Best Buy here in town and the Comp USA sell apple products including notebooks and desktops.

 

[mrweirdo]

hapend across this info when searched google for ibook G4 reviews

According to the forums at macnn and appleinsider, Apple is using LG. Phillips LCD screens on the 12" PowerBook(same as iBook), shame on them! These screens do indeed have poor specs: Viewing Angle: 50/90, 6Bit 262,144 colors(not even true millions of colors!), and a very slow response time of 45ms. Here is the likely source for the 12" screen:
http://www.lgphilips-lcd.com/en/product/notebook.html?tg=view&idx=169

not good if that is true. I was looking at geting an ibook G4 with an airport card for $1,088 with my student discount mainly because i love the battery life of 4-6 hours. But with an LCD of such poor quality I might just have to go with a pc laptop that I can install linux on instead.

 

[Frightcrawler]

:frown: 6 bit
PC's have at least 16 bit

 

[jschuk]

I was also under the impression that the best LCD's max out at 24bits. Maybe that was a couple of years ago? Someone prove me wrong so I can be up to date.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: jschuk
I was also under the impression that the best LCD's max out at 24bits. Maybe that was a couple of years ago? Someone prove me wrong so I can be up to date.

No, you're right, mostly. A few Eizo LCDs use 10 (or is it 12) bits per channel internally to apply gamma curve corrections etc., but even they still take 8 bits/channel data from the computer. It's going to be a while before we'll have operating systems and monitors that can handle 10 b/c output and more from video cards (the Parhelia and Px50 from Matrox are the only cards that can do true 30 bit color now, though as OS support comes in the form of Windows Longhorn, more cards will be able to take advantage of the higher color depth).

Note that the 32 bit color in your display driver is really 24 bit color (3 byte) packed in 4 byte boundaries... When games refer to 32 bit color, they refer to a 4 channel visual which includes an alpha channel for transparency in addition to R G and B.

Additionally, the Apple Cinema displays are supposed to have very good color rendition (this is not to say that the laptops are of anywhere near the same quality - I don't know about them). Of course, if you're used to seeing uncalibrated PC monitors that have way too contrasty colors and icky blueish "whitepoints," then a monitor with accurate colors may look odd to you. You'll probably be inclined to say that Barco, Sony Artisan, and any other more normal monitors that have been calibrated look crappy.