Quatron quad pixel technology - From Sharp

Ivan Seeking

http://www.lcdtvbuyingguide.com/hdtv...quadcolor.html

A Gimmick, overreaching, or the new standard?

pallidin

I've wondered that myself, Ivan.
To some extent I can see the rationale of their technique with respect to enhancing yellow, gold and brass colors. But I don't know. I have not actually seen the display which, presumably, is necessary for that enhanced effect.

If true, however, I can envision industry embracing/expanding this concept of going beyond the standard RGB for color combinations.

MotoH

Would a man in a lab coat lie to us?

In all seriousness I can't wait to get to best buy to check these TV's out against the other standard RGB ones.

Pengwuino

I think if this is the "Deep Color" that I've seen hints of here and there (ever since I got my new LCD tv :D), it might be interesting. They're attempting to go beyond the 32bit color scheme and use 48 bits. I wonder if this is the first move into that area?

berkeman

This link has some initial impressions:

http://hometheater.about.com/b/2010/...on-tv-line.htm

It does seem that to get a bigger improvement, Sharp would also have to come out with production video cameras (or get Sony to do it) that have the yellow pixels as part of the recorded image...

russ_watters

A typical monitor does 32 bits (8 bits per color, plus 8 luminance), which equals 4 billion colors. If the human eye can't distinguish that many anyway, what difference does it make going up to 40 bit (1 trillion) colors?

Have a look at this: http://img452.imageshack.us/img452/8...nt32bit3ze.png

pallidin

I could be wrong here, but I think the issue is whether having a dedicated yellow pixel enhances visual quality. Instead of the RGB triad we can now have a RGBY quad.

Instead of new cameras, I could see where display electronics could port the yellow to the dedicated pixel as opposed to allocating the entire RGB pixel array to achieve it.
Much like how "standard" red green and blue is done... dedicated pixels.

Just some thoughts...

russ_watters

Yes. So what does "enhances visual quality" mean? Does it mean we get colors we didn't used to get? And if so, can we tell the difference between ones we've seen before and these new colors?

Redbelly98

If we can't believe a Federation officer, I am joining the Klingons where honor still means something.

Hurkyl

It's been a while since I've looked at it, but I've heard it described as color being a convex set in the plane. Given three base colors (e.g. RGB), you can mix them to form any color in the triangle they define, but none of the ones outside of the triangle. If you add in another base, you can get new colors, rather than just a finer discretization of existing colors.

russ_watters

Ok....[researches]....

Here are two articles about that concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_triangle

The short of it is that you are right. This surprises me, since I would have thought the RGB colors we used were a good match of the sensitivies of our eyes. In other words, why aren't the filters on an RGB grid matched to the wavelength sensitivities of our eyes' color receptors? And how far off are they? And where does this new color lie? I would think if it is on a straight line between red and green (a "true" yellow?), that would mean it wouldn't offer anything new. And why have I never heard of this problem in photography or noticed it in real life?

mgb_phys

A better example is :



More colors would let you fill in more of the color space than the triangle.
You could also move the three primary colors outward (make the triangle bigger) - but this means darker blue and red filters which means more power to give the same apparent brightness.
This is why you have aRGB, sRGB etc - you optomize the size of the triangle to trade brightness for color fidelity.

Hurkyl

I can offer some rampant speculation.

• There may have been technical issues (e.g. availability of cheap pigments, what frequencies were emitted by cheap chemicals) originally that have stuck around for the sake of backwards compatibility.
• The colors are optimized for what for what is shown -- e.g. to give finer control over skin tones.
• These colors were once mistakenly believed to generate all colors

aRGB is something else; the a specifies transparency, which specifies how a given color in an image is to be mixed with the background color.

mgb_phys

aRGB in the sense of adobeRGB gamut (as opposed to HP/MS sRGB) - this is different to RGBA (A=Alpha transparency)

Hurkyl

I've seen RGBA written ARGB and aRGB as well. I couldn't find any other aRGB when I wrote my post.

Moonbear

I can only comment from the perspective of using fluorescence microscopy. When dealing with colors such as those of fluorescent dyes, nothing on the computer screen ever fully matches what I see with my own eyes through a microscope. The best I can describe it is that the colors are "flatter."

So, strangely enough, I can conceptualize the ability to affect the range of colors viewed by adding another color channel. Though, I haven't seen any of these displays to really know if I can REALLY see the difference. What I do know is that I'm not willing to pay gobs of extra money for whatever difference it can produce, but can only hope it means other people will and it will drive down the prices of currently marketed RGB displays.

mgb_phys

You could play around with your software and monitor settings (see http://www.normankoren.com/makingfineprints1A.html) or it could be that your dyes are outside the gamut of the monitor - ie it can't display them without some new dyes on the screen.

Your eyes also respond differently looking down a microscope to what you see on a monitor in a brightly lit lab.