How important is 10-bit color, really?

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by RWetmore

That's an interesting and good way of looking at it, but with 8bit rec. 709 we still get banding. Will there be banding with 10bit rec. 2020 seems to be the fundamental issue and question. That is, is twice the precision provided by 10bits enough to eliminate banding for rec. 2020? I would think 12bits is for sure, but for 10bits I'm somewhat skeptical.

In general, any wider color gamut expands the distance between consecutive codes given the same bit depth. The following figure shows the histogram of color differences ∆ Eab* between all consecutive 8-bit codes for BT.709 primaries and the primaries of BT.2020…



The mean and max values are listed in the next table as pictured below. The mean of ∆ Eab* for UHDTV is 35% larger than that of HDTV. This means that 1 more bit of precision is sufficient to make the ∆ Eab* equal to or less than that of HDTV. The maximum value for UHDTV would be below 1 if 10-bit is employed.



When do people think consumer TV manufacturers will actually offer to the public widespread 10 bit panels capable of 12 bit processing, i.e. something like this - http://www.flandersscientific.com/index/cm250.php but with a 4K rez LCD technology?