Yamaha BD-S2900 BLU-RAY player

[HDTV1080P]

Here is a link to info on the new Yamaha BD-S2900 BLU-RAY player that will support 12 bit deep color just like the PS3 does. I was just reading an article on page 58 and 59 of the September 2008 Widescreen Review magazine that demonstrates that many low quality HDMI cables can not handle the speed of 12 bit deep color and cause video dropouts. Most low quality HDMI cables can handle standard 8 bit color just fine. Hopefully in the future BLU-RAY movies will be encoded with deep color. Some HDMI 1.3 displays have the advanced chip sets for deep color and all we need now is the movies to be released with deep color. 100GB+ BLU-RAY discs could handle deep color.
http://www.homemediamagazine.com/news/html/breaking_article.cfm?sec_id=2&article_id=13404

[welwynnick]

Deep colour on Blu-ray has been discussed many times; often by me. Given the amount of space available, it seemed like a potential product descriminator against HDDVD.

But no, Blu-ray is YCbCr 4:2:0 8-bits only, and that's the way it will probably stay. A great shame, but 12-bit Blu-ray discs could not be played on current machines at all, so deep colour would effectively mean a new standard and format.

I'm sure we'll see more and more players that can "upsample", for want of a better word, from standard to deep colour and help to remove a bit of colour banding. Scaling is a way of inventing more spatial resolution, but since 1920x1080 is all we will need for some time, inventing greater depth of modulation may be a worthwhile way forwards.

As with scaling though, I believe that the display itself is where the up-sampling may be done to best effect, so that all sources can benefit from it. There would be no need for special sources and connections then, as the orginal 8-bit stored data is all that's needed. I have no doubt that we will see such processing appearing in every stage of the playback chain in due course, however, just as we have seen with up-scaling.

BR, Nick