Why Deep Color if the human eye cant see it?

[Porfie]

Just confused what the big deal is since everywhere I have read says the human eye can not even perceive this?

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...129TX1K0000532

June 12, 2006
HDMI Upgraded To Support 'Deep Color'
By Mark Hachman
Discuss this now (1 posts)
The High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) specification, a key component of digital television, has been upgraded to support "deep color," the group controlling the interface said Monday.
HDMI LLC, which was founded by Hitachi, Matsushita Electric (Panasonic), Royal Philips Electronics, Silicon Image, Sony Corporation, Thomson and Toshiba Corporation, oversees the HDMI interface, which has served as the multimedia interface for digital television. Over 400 firms have licensed the technology, and the firm estimates that 1 billion HDMI-compliant devices will be available by 2009.

ADVERTISEMENT Under the new HDMI 1.3 specification, the clock speed will be increased from 165 MHz to over 225 MHz, said HDMI president of licensing Leslie Chard. The increased bandwidth will allow support for 1080 x 60 Hz displays with 36-bit RGB color, or a 1080p display with a 90 Hz refresh rate. Technically, the specification leaves room for clock rates of up to 450 MHz, Chard said.

The new standard will add a new upgrade path for digital television owners and buyers. Very early DTVs lacked an HDMI connection, leaving early consumers with concerns over whether or not they would be able to play protected content. Now, the new specification promises an enhanced level of detail for next-generation content. According to Chard, a few early adopters should announce products soon, Chard said, with "lots of products by the end of the year," in time for Christmas, he said.

The key addition to the new specification has been the support for 30-, 36-, and 48-bit RGB or "deep" color, a specifcation that extends color depths beyond the capability of the human eye to perceive them.

The ITU 601 standard, which governs today's displays, allows only 60 to 80 percent of the available colors, even if the display can support more, Chard said. "The color bit depth [of today's displays] is typically 24-bits RGB – that gets you 16 million colors, and the human eye can distinguish that," Chard said. "That leads to scaling and onscreen effects which you can pick up. Either 36-bit or 48-bit RGB is beyond the ability of the human eye to distinguish."
Sony's upcoming PlayStation 3 will support deep color, Chard said, and PC graphics companies like ATI and Nvidia can bake the technology fairly easily into its cards, he said. Although the "deep color" provision was added with the next-generation Blu-Ray and HD-DVD specifications in mind, no formal announcement of support has been made by either camp.




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"We don't have a public announcement, but it's natural to assume as standards get big and are accepted that they may be used," Chard said.
"Anybody going to have an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray drive needs to have an HDMI output," Chard added. "Anyone who's claiming to have a media notebook needs to have this."

The new color depths will be consistent with the new "xvYCC" color scheme which was adopted as a standard by the International Electrotechnical Commission in January. Sony showed off a xvYCC-compliant 82-inch LCD at this year's CES.

The standard will also add support for Dolby HD and DTS-HD audio. The audio will be combined with a lip-sync compensation feature to synchronize the audio and visual channels -- not actively, but through the use of latency information which will will be actively communicated to the other components, Chard said. Finally, support for an HDMI mini-connector has been added, to allow digital video to be streamed from a compliant camcorder directly to a display.

Finally, future displays will support what is known as "Consumer Electronics Control," a standard that will allow the HDMI devices to talk to one another, and configure themselves. The most profound effect will probably be the phasing out of the high-end remote control devices, which will be replaced with a simpler control scheme, Chard said. The technology may be marketed as "One-Touch Play," he said.

The HDMI interface is often thought of as the hardware component to the High-Definition Content Protection standard, which is governed by a separate licensing organization. No HDCP-specific provisions were made, Chard said, although the new HDMI spec "caused a few bugs" in testing with HDCP, he said.

[crackinhedz]

Some women may see 100 million colors, thanks to their genes

"Based on Dr. Neitz's estimates, there could be 99 million women in the world with true four-color vision."


...imagine housewives all over the world becomeing Blu.

[Porfie]

Thats great but im a man what about us?

[crackinhedz]

Originally Posted by Porfie

Thats great but im a man what about us?

I feel ya.

Honestly, I know that science has yet to prove how many colors we humans can actually perceive (scientific guess). So in that respect, if movies can provide deep color they should, weather we can see it or not. Maybe some of us can? ... id dam sure hate to miss out if I could.

[ps3andlovinit]

Originally Posted by Porfie

Thats great but im a man what about us?

As in most things related to women..you lose.

[Porfie]

Originally Posted by ps3andlovinit

As in most things related to women..you lose.

Yea go figure. Oh well!

[Robmx]

I upgraded my lcd for 1.3 hdmi, would hate to find out it was for nothing !

Question: Will 1.3 hdmi require a different hdmi cable or will anyone work? I have one Im using right now. Just wondering if I might be missing out on anything !

[richard lichtenfelt]

Originally Posted by ps3andlovinit

As in most things related to women..you lose.

My virginity, but not much else. The key is to use humor to avert being pulled into an argument. When arguing, women push emotional buttons to make you lose your cool at which point you are all but beat. If you find she is refusing to drop it just ask her what it is that is really bothering her. Once you get this info ask what it is that she expects of you. Avoid a heated, emotional confrontation.
Oh yea, and watch blu-rays.

[radagast]

Why Deep Color if the human eye cant see it?

Simple. Same reason you have frame rates faster than the human mind can perceive and why you have 24 bit audio with sampling rates that produce a higher frequency response and signal-to-noise ratio than humans can hear.

[Porfie]

Originally Posted by radagast

Why Deep Color if the human eye cant see it?

Simple. Same reason you have frame rates faster than the human mind can perceive and why you have 24 bit audio with sampling rates that produce a higher frequency response and signal-to-noise ratio than humans can hear.

LOL yea i see your point. Oh well as long as companies make more money and we keep giving it to them. Hey at least all these bells and whistles sound and look great even if we can't really see or hear the differance.

[jorg]

Originally Posted by radagast

Why Deep Color if the human eye cant see it?

Simple. Same reason you have frame rates faster than the human mind can perceive and why you have 24 bit audio with sampling rates that produce a higher frequency response and signal-to-noise ratio than humans can hear.

dead on

[mdm1699]

Originally Posted by Porfie

Thats great but im a man what about us?

Upgrade your eyes.

[ps3andlovinit]

Originally Posted by richard lichtenfelt

My virginity, but not much else.

LMFAO..you just reminded me of the one time you actually win..

[doctorsteve]

The number of colors in nature is infinite. To say there is a finite number perceivable is wrong. Due to the fact that every person has a different number of Red, Green, and Blue cones in their eyes means every single person has a different perception of color. Added to that, it's true that different forms of these cells (produced by varying genetics) exist, varying perception even more.

The limits come when we measure the brain's ability to notice the difference between to similar colors - some people are better at it than others. If you filled a 52" Bravia with similar pixels that contained light that we'd all call "red" - you may not be able to distinguish the difference between pixels that are right next to each other, but you Would be able to see the difference from one side of the screen to the other.

So, especially in fast moving images (which Color vision cones LOVE), the capacity of hardware to record, generate, and display as many different colors as possible can only serve to enhance the realistic quality of a reproduced image.

If the color exists, I want to have the chance to see it.

Mo' colors. Mo' Real.

Does that help?
By the way, I'm an eye doctor... ;D

[JonD7]

Ha, i'm going to get my eyes checked out tomorrow for glasses, hopefully once I get them I can see these colors eh?
*hangs head*

actually I practically feel blind from one eye... hmm... ah well.

[Flea77]

Originally Posted by radagast

Why Deep Color if the human eye cant see it?

Simple. Same reason you have frame rates faster than the human mind can perceive and why you have 24 bit audio with sampling rates that produce a higher frequency response and signal-to-noise ratio than humans can hear.

Actually 24bit sound is more about SNR than frequency response, with SNRs over 100 requiring 24bit, which we can definitely tell. With frequency responses it is not really about the frequency in question, but more about the harmonics that frequency generates withing the realm that we can hear.

As for faster frame rates, there are several reasons to increase frame rates. For example, even though we supposedly can not see much past 30FPS that is making many assumptions such as the eye being stationary, the lighting, etc.

A great way to see this is with fluorescent lights, especially with CRT displays. If our eyes can not see anything faster than 30fps why then do so many people get eye strain working with CRTs under fluorescent lights? Simple, they have their monitors set to the default refresh rate of either 56 or 60hz, about the same as the fluorescent lights, since they are not in sync you see the blinks between them, even though they are faster than 30fps.

Now I may be wrong here, but a much more correct answer to the question would be that deep color refers to the pallet of colors to choose from, and when rendering lifelike video I would say that although one could not preceive the difference between 24bit and 36bit color on the screen at once, one could easily pick out a 36bit color pallet movie from a 24bit one.

Here is a good test to show what I mean. Since we all know that a movie is made up of many still frames lets work with only two frames. Take a picture of a cartoon, for example lets say a still from Bugs Life, open it in photoshop, save it as a GIF file with a 256 color pallet, and save the pallet. Now open a beautiful scene of something like a castle on a lake, say from Entrapment. Save that image as a 256 color GIF using the same color pallet you used before, it looks like garbage!

Bugs picture which uses 256 color pallet....

Castle original photo, 16.7 million colors....

Castle using the same 256 color pallet as the original bugs...


See how using a small color pallet does not necessarily make for a bad image (the 256 color Bugs photo) but when you have to deal with one continuous color pallet it can make another scene look horrible (photo 3).

Now I am massively oversimplifying this, and I already stated that I could be wrong, but I think this is why you can see a difference even though your eye may not be able to see ALL the colors next to each other.

Trust me on one thing though, if no one could ever tell that 24bit audio was better than 16bit, or that 36bit color was better than 24bit, or that no one could see anything faster than 30FPS, not one single company on the planet would spend the R&D money to develop it unless it was dirt cheap, which none of these are.

Allan

[doctorsteve]

No rush, you can schedule for next week as I believe there are no sources now or for the near future for Deep Color content...

[doctorsteve]

Thanks Allen, Great example and points. And these are static images! Movement is important in color vision. Think Car racing, sports, fast action movies. A source, player, and TV that can process Deep color would enhance the experience (read: realism).

[androvsky]

Originally Posted by Porfie

"That leads to scaling and onscreen effects which you can pick up. Either 36-bit or 48-bit RGB is beyond the ability of the human eye to distinguish."

Argh. I deal with this a lot. Yes, that's more colors than the human eye can distinguish (for the most part), but even though 24-bit color allows for 16 million colors, at 8 bits per color, that's only 256 brightness levels for any one color. It's like sampling 192 KHz audio at only 8 bits per sample, it doesn't allow for very much dynamic range. Deep color is a bit of a misnomer, Deep Brightness might be more accurate. With 16 bits per color, you have enough of a dynamic range to actually do something useful with dark scenes and bright scenes.

Deep Color might not do much on current displays, but when we start getting devices with a decent dynamic range, you'll love it. Trust me.

[doctorsteve]

Originally Posted by androvsky

Argh. I deal with this a lot. Yes, that's more colors than the human eye can distinguish (for the most part), but even though 24-bit color allows for 16 million colors, at 8 bits per color, that's only 256 brightness levels for any one color. It's like sampling 192 KHz audio at only 8 bits per sample, it doesn't allow for very much dynamic range. Deep color is a bit of a misnomer, Deep Brightness might be more accurate. With 16 bits per color, you have enough of a dynamic range to actually do something useful with dark scenes and bright scenes.

Deep Color might not do much on current displays, but when we start getting devices with a decent dynamic range, you'll love it. Trust me.

Tips hat to A. Good post.