The HP Dreamcolor Display, 30 bit color...

The HP Dreamcolor monitors have been creating a bit of buzz around the post production industry. These displays utilize an LED backlight to increase the color precision of the monitor to 30 bits. (10 bits/channel as opposed to 8 bits per channel, which is how most cold cathode fluorescent backlit LCD displays seem to be defined.)

(See the blog post from December 11th, linking to Martin Euredjian's assessment of LED backlight deployment in LCD panels for another perspective.)

If DreamWorks finds the technology acceptable for their work, it would seem that it probably achieves its claims, but extensive testing is still happening and as with most new products these days, the monitor itself has had some software upgrades to improve performance...

Below, the Hard Forum Review seems pretty thorough, though the reviewer mentions he doesn't have all the hard measurement tools he'd like to substantiate a few subjective analyses...but still considerable work put in and some off-brochure info... Dithering seems to be something of concern.


The Hard Forum Review

An HP person chimes in on the Creative Cow thread below. Someone mentions the dithering mentioned in the Hard Forum review and Dan Bennett from HP says he's seen it but there's a firmware upgrade for the monitor, though the Hard Forum reviewer seems to show he has the latest firmware...

The Creative Cow.net Apple Color Forum thread

HP's FAQ on the Dreamcolor monitor is here:

The HP Dreamcolor FAQ

For reference: PNY NVIDIA's two 30 bit display cards capable of driving the Dreamcolor:

QuadroFX 4800 (one Dual-link DVI port)

QuadroFX 5800 (two dual-link DVI ports)

There are other display card vendors of course, and I've tried to scan the product lines of ATI and Matrox for 30 bit capable cards...while ATI appears to have some products with 30 bit support on PC only (24 bit on Mac), it's difficult to discern if Matrox has a product or not. I'm almost positive I've encountered a description of a Matrox product that supports 30 bit...I'm checking further.

(Update: After a few email exchanges with Matrox, it appears that the instances where Matrox display cards talk about display cards with numbers larger than 24 bit, they are referring to 32 bit, which would be 3-8 bit color channels an 8 bit alpha channel, not 30 bit color precision, which would be 3-10 bit color channels.)


TimK