8bit vs 10bit, what do I want?

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tangoseal

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I dont know what I want because I just havent seen or touched these technologies in person.

I have never owned an IPS or VA lcd.
I have owned countless LCD based on TN.

However on the other hand since I have never owned an IPS or MVA im not truly sure if I will personally be able to tell the difference between 8bit 16.7m or 10 bit 1.08(or whatever)bill colors.

I do web work, touch up photos (completely amateur and for fun), and play games. I read LOTS of text on my LCD also and do a lot of office work. I do NOT watch movies on my PC. I have a blue-ray and 50" for that out in the other room.

How does an IPS at 16.7m look better than a TN at 16.7m. And seriously, the LCDs that display a billion colors, is that even worth the extra money?

Basically im bent between getting HP ZR24W or Asus PA246Q, both based on IPS.

So my question is .... is 16.7m IPS better than 1bill for what I described I do.
 
ips will have much better viewing angles and color reproduction over tn

you probably might notice some slight difference btw 10bit over 8bit, but nothing earth-shattering

that being said, the hp and asus are pretty much the same price - so i would go for the asus with the better contrast ratio, hdmi port, higher vertical refresh rate, and ability to rotate to portrait
 
http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/content/dell_u3011.htm

It's all very well saying a panel is capable of 10-bit colour depth (1.07 billion colour palette) as opposed to an 8-bit colour depth (16.7 million colours), but you need to take into account whether this is practically useable and whether you're ever going to truly use that colour depth. Apart from the requirements of your application, operating system, graphics card and software, one more pertinent limitation is from a display point of view, where there must be an interface which can support 10-bit colour depth. At the moment DisplayPort is the only option which can. It is provided here, but a full 10-bit work flow is still extremely uncommon in the current market.
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Hrrm it would seem that 10 bit is future proof for sure. I can support 10 bit with my 6970. Thanks for the inputs and now I have a little more food for thought.
 
tangoseal said:
Hrrm it would seem that 10 bit is future proof for sure. I can support 10 bit with my 6970. Thanks for the inputs and now I have a little more food for thought.
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Well, you should be aware that JPEG images are in essentially every case 8-bit. If you shoot RAW you'll get 12-bit or 14-bit images, but when you convert them to JPEG they go right back down to 8-bit.

There are 12-bit JPEGs, but support for them is rare except in the medical world, although 16-bit TIFFs are somewhat popular among photographers that do additional editing outside of their RAW conversion program.

In any case, higher-bit photos are going to be dithered on any display, just to a lesser degree on a 10-bit display. The difference is going to be tiny, if viewable at all, though. I never see dithering on my 6-bit panels (I also own an uber-expensive 8-bit IPS and used to own a high-end CRT) except in the occasional possible case of sky gradients in photos, which I can't attribute for sure to my monitor and not overworking the photo.

IOW, don't really worry about it. You WILL, however, see the difference in viewing angles and color accuracy (if calibrated).
 
kumquatsrus said:
that being said, the hp and asus are pretty much the same price - so i would go for the asus with the better contrast ratio, hdmi port, higher vertical refresh rate, and ability to rotate to portrait
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ZR24W can rotate to portrait no problem! Can the Asus run at >60hz?
 
wagoo said:
ZR24W can rotate to portrait no problem! Can the Asus run at >60hz?
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I dont know can the HP? Although not the most important for me I would like to see 75hz atleast but not necessary. It does help.
 
Wait you can use a Displayport and say a ATI 6870 and a Dell U2410 and get 10 bit color instead of 8 bit? I never knew that..
 
I guess so. I didnt know that either. I did know display port was a high end feature for the last year or two and now its becoming mainstream as a really high data rate format.
 
You do not need the 10-bit, unless money is burning a whole in your pocket. The IPS panel and the quality of the housing and electronics is what is the most important. You are much better off going for the size of monitor you want, in an IPS screen, than worrying about 10 bit vs 8 bit.

For reading, remember about the high resolution and dot pitch. Yes Windows can scale fonts, but it still turns out that the native resolution keeps creeping in.

A 24 inch 1920 x 1200 has a much small font size than a 19inch 1280 x 1024. I find that a 27 inch 1920 x 1200 is perfect, but its a rare animal. The Dell 2709w was the one I was familiar with.

I personally think 24 is just too small. Put the 10 bit money in to size instead
 
tombaker said:
You do not need the 10-bit, unless money is burning a whole in your pocket. The IPS panel and the quality of the housing and electronics is what is the most important. You are much better off going for the size of monitor you want, in an IPS screen, than worrying about 10 bit vs 8 bit.

For reading, remember about the high resolution and dot pitch. Yes Windows can scale fonts, but it still turns out that the native resolution keeps creeping in.

A 24 inch 1920 x 1200 has a much small font size than a 19inch 1280 x 1024. I find that a 27 inch 1920 x 1200 is perfect, but its a rare animal. The Dell 2709w was the one I was familiar with.

I personally think 24 is just too small. Put the 10 bit money in to size instead
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Barf... You can take your huge pixels and moire from the intra-pixel areas and keep it to yourself. Beyond the amazingly smooth look of scaled text, you can actually fit two whole side-by-side documents (or websites) next to each other with room for toolbars once you get to 2304x1440 and larger.
 
I can tell you that I would rather have this 1920*1200 24" IPS over any 27" huge pixel monster. The price for a 27" IPS is not a good price -performance ratio for me and 24" just happens to be my sweet spot.
 
Martha Davenport said:
I just bought a Doublesight DS-277W which is 27" S-IPS with 1 Billion colors and I love it. I have had the doublesight DS-263N for years and bought that because of a hard forum review so I am paying that forward with info on the new models. Doublesight has 5 IPS modles - I just looked them up:
DS-245V - 24"
DS-275W - 27"
DS-277W - 27"
DS-305W - 30"
DS-307W - 30"

I bought mine from provantage.com who is much easier to deal with than newegg.
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When I order 2 more displays from Amazon, im really thinking of getting a Doublesight DS-U9 9" USB LCD for running my Aida 64 system monitoring OSD in as well as chat and other things that I want to run while gaming.
 
Blackbeard Ben said:
Barf... You can take your huge pixels and moire from the intra-pixel areas and keep it to yourself. Beyond the amazingly smooth look of scaled text, you can actually fit two whole side-by-side documents (or websites) next to each other with room for toolbars once you get to 2304x1440 and larger.
Click to expand...

My point remains that the 10-bit is not worth cost. If you have 12 bit processing you will have smoother gradients anyways....see EIZO, Lacie and NEC.

A buyer is better off with skipping the 10-bit panel, and put the money into IPS and screen size
 
My point remains that the 10-bit is not worth cost. If you have 12 bit processing you will have smoother gradients anyways....see EIZO, Lacie and NEC.
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Yes, you will avoid a loss of tonal values regarding the input signal when using OSD controls or (if possible) a hardware calibration. We should add that real 10bit panels are quite rare. What leads to most 10bit advertisments is a 10bit capable DisplayPort and a FRC stage - although the last one is nothing new but has been used for many years now. Not only in TN panels but in all better displays with extensive electronic. It would make no sense to avoid a loss of tonal values during processing of the signal when just cutting it off at the very end. Good FRC only shows minor artifacts in this case (slight temporal noise which can be seen in dark tonal values).

Best regards

Denis
 
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