Lawsuit targets Apple over laptop display dithering claims

Dumming down...

This can be the problem with dumming down in IT. Many systems no longer say 65535, 24bit, 32bit or 16.7Million colours etc., instead they say millions and thousands, because it's 'more friendly'. You then get into the situation where a monitor isn't capable of displaying 16.7M colours, but that's ok if it can display a few million because they haven't lied to anyone.

It's a bit of a shitty trick though it does have it's precidents in HDD sizes. Everyone else says that a MB is 1024 KB, the HDD manufacturers say that it's 1000KB...

Another pain with the Macbook?

I can't see this going anywhere. The reason been that no screen can show all of the millions of colours promised. The machine can render, yes, but the screen cannot display them visibly. No screen can, in fact. Besides, its common fact that the human eye cannot detect that many colors, only a fraction of them.

Personally I think the Macbook has the best screen ever on a laptop. Any PC-based system pales in comparison in all honesty. But surely, if these guys DO win a court case, all screen and notebook manufacturers are open to attacks by people like these.

It's all the same

PC laptops use the same LCD panels as Mac laptops, so they are in the same boat. Nothing new here.

Silly

I may be wrong but high-end graphics users rarely relied on Apple monitors, especially when color accuracy is important. There are other vendors that provide displays with much better gamuts, and until very recently these were based on CRTs (which excludes laptops).

What Apple does provide is their ColorSync workflow to allow various apps to cooperate with a color-matching engine and correctly handle the ICC profiles of various connected devices.

A.

Re "the human eye cannot detect that many colors, only a fraction of them"

Although the human eye can't detect that many colors simultaneously, it has extremely fine dynamic contrast, and so until there's a monitor which can adjust its contrast based specifically on what the user is looking at, the human eye is capable of perceiving a far wider gamut than any monitor while also able to differentiate fine differences between colors on a narrow gamut. If the color differences weren't perceptible then this lawsuit would have never come up.

At least the MacBook displays dither; my 23" HP monitor at home doesn't even do that, and so gradients get terrible banding. Though it sounds from the description like the MacBook's dithering is positional, rather than temporal; temporal dithering would take advantage of the inherent lagginess of LCD to make the dithering much less noticeable. (It's actually a form of temporal dithering which allows LCDs to produce more than two shades to begin with, but there's a limit to how effective it can be within a single refresh, especially as refresh times get pushed down further and further to try to offer a more CRT-like viewing experience.)

macs having better displays than any PCs?

Apparently that guy missed the memo that Apple doesnt actually built displays but buys them like everyone else. Everyone else being PCs.

I hate class-action lawyers and hope this fails miserably achieving nothing more than costing this guy money.

Re: macs having better displays than any PCs?

Today more than ever, Macs are PC's. The difference is almost entirely software. In fact if Apple choose to allow it, their operating system could run perfectly fine on commodity hardware. The only reason it can't is pure marketing. After all both Windows and Linux can run on the "Mac" (aka PC) hardware.

So, yes Macs are PC's, but so what?

I have no experience with these dithering displays, however if there is a problem and Apple did in fact lie, then it is irrelevant where they got the displays from.

"Apparently that guy missed the memo that Apple doesnt actually built displays but buys them like everyone else."

If Apple advertises "X", they must produce X. If X was bought through another company, Apple may have a case against that company. However this certainly can't reduce Apple's responsibility for truthful advertising to customers.

Laptops have additional outputs

The computers in question would still have auxiliary output to monitors where the colors would have been displayable without dithering. There are additional benefits like blending which aggregates colors better prior to dithering if you have more colors. I don't think it is a tough case to make that a "system" should support a color display of the claimed quality. What makes it tough is the escape hatch provided by external display support etc.

Title

"Today more than ever, Macs are PC's. The difference is almost entirely software. In fact if Apple choose to allow it, their operating system could run perfectly fine on commodity hardware. The only reason it can't is pure marketing. After all both Windows and Linux can run on the "Mac" (aka PC) hardware."

Hardly marketing why Apple wouldn't want to allow OS X to run on commodity hardware... the reason Apple have such a great following is the incredibly strict guidelines on software/hardware... programs are designed to run on a specific hardware set, so no new cheap Chinese import graphics cards that claims to be the bees knees can be used, but these could be bought and when plugged into your PC causes XP (or god forbid Vista) to have issues and refuse to work.

Apple are in control of their market as they make the whole package, Microsoft et al have to develop OS's to work with a nigh on infinite combination of hardware configurations, which is a pretty daunting task in my opinion

Re: Re: macs having better displays than any PCs?

I was referring to the earlier comment stating that macs have better displays than any PCs. Seeing as how my PC has the same Samsung display I dont see any foundation for his claim. Im not a fanboy, I use Wintels and always have.

I dont disagree that Apple was probably cheating on their ads I just dont like class action lawsuits because their only purpose is to make the lawyers lots of money.