And it was very impressive what Apple could display using just 256 carefully selected colors. Apple’s 8-bit video card could display 256 colors from a palette of over 16 million colors – the same number of colors that a true 24-bit screen can display. When Apple introduced the Mac II in 1987, it introduced color to the Macintosh world. We’ll see what happens in the legal realm, but the question remains, How much difference does it make? GIF They claim that 18-bit video is “particularly ill-suited to editing photographs because of the display’s limited color potential and the distorting effect of the color simulation processes.” Then they point out that the 20″ iMac displays 98% fewer colors than the 24″ model. Lawyers, never known for understatement, are claiming that this makes the 20″ iMac “vastly inferior to the previous generation it replaced” and that Apple’s claim to support millions of colors is “grossly inflated”. And, as with MacBooks, Apple continues to claim that these iMacs can display millions of colors on the built-in display. Earlier flat-panel iMacs had used 24-bit displays, and the 24″ model still does. The issue has come up again after someone discovered that the 20″ iMac introduced last summer uses an 18-bit display. To this day Apple continues to advertise that the entire MacBook line supports millions of colors on the built-in display. No judge had to determine whether Apple was misleading customers and whether the use of an 18-bit display made a computer unsuitable for photo editing. I wrote Apple Sued: Can 262,144 Colors Be Considered ‘Millions’? and asked, “Does it really matter? Is a quarter million colors good enough, regardless of what the lawsuit contends?”Īpple settled with Gatley and Greaves earlier this year, so the case never went to trial. The general consensus was that Apple and others were using dithering to smooth things out so that the 24-bit images looked smooth, not banded. By averaging two adjacent pixels together on an 18-bit color display, you again emulate a 2 million color display, thereby meeting the “millions” claim.Īfter the suit was filed, we pointed to How Good Is Your Color?, a page on the No, Dave, It’s Just You blog that included sample pages showing 18-bit and 24-bit color visitors to the site widely reported that they didn’t see the same banding in the 24-bit image that they expected based on the 18-bit sample – even though they had notebook computers with 18-bit displays. Dithering is using two or more pixels to create the illusion of in-between shades, and it was widely used in the early days of the Mac when the built-in displays were only capable of displaying black and white with no shades of gray. The other theory was that Apple was dithering the display. This would also explain why images seemed to shimmer a bit. By doing this, Apple would be able to display “in between” shades, essentially providing 7 bits per color channel for a total of 2,097,152 colors. These notebooks still use 18-bit displays with 6 bits for red, 6 for green, and 6 for blue.Īt the same time, MacBook Pro owners had been complaining of “grainy” and “sparkly” displays, and the conjecture was that Apple was simulating more than 262,144 colors by rapidly changing the color of individual pixels. The first suit came almost a year ago when Dave Gatley and Fred Greaves of San Diego filed suit against Apple, claiming that the LCD screens on the MacBook and MacBook Pro models were not suitable for high-quality work, especially photo editing, because the displays could not display the “millions” of colors claimed in advertising, spec sheets, and the Displays system preference pane. 2008: For the second time in a year, Apple is being sued for Macs that display “millions” of colors but using displays that can only display 262,144 colors per pixel.
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