LCD color how to tell which bit?

H

HRJustin

n00b
Joined
Apr 26, 2007
Messages
21
i was just wondering i got this new HP w1907 and it doesn't seem to have any stuck pixels or anything that i can see. i was a little worried about getting it because it was the only one that walmart had and the box was a little crinkled in the corner. but i got it home and hooked it all up and it works fine. but i did notice that the color is alot different on an this then my old Emachine CRT huge monitor. ive been reading about this effect and noticed that its a problem with most LCDs so i was just wondering which color bit this would be. im guessing it must be below 24-bit true colors because thats what i used on the old crt and it seems alot different. it seems wierd that they don't specifically show what it would be on the specs. other then the color thing its fine i had to lower the brightness and contrast down really low compared to the default settings because i was used to my old monitor being dark.

thanks in advance to anyone that can post some comments or personal experiences on this phenomenon.
 
I assume this is your first lcd...everyone has an adjustment period when first switching from a crt. I don't know what panel that monitor uses but if it was under $300 then it is most likely a 6-bit TN@ 16.2m colors or it may use dithering to simulate 16.7m colors.
 
Joe, I guess you are the same joemama as in the dpreview forums?

Just one little thing. 16.2 "million" colors already is using dithering. Either temporal or spatial. True colors of 6-bit panels is just (2^6)^3, or 262,144 total colors. That sucks, that's what we get in our little digital cameras' LCDs. There was some speculation that they could reach 16.7 by using 6-bit and another method of dithering plus something else that I don't quite remember, but there is no proof, and the manufacturers of course are happy being obscure about this.

To the OP, in any case, that the colors are different it doesn't mean that the panel is a TN or whatever. It's just not calibrated. At $300, it probably is a PVA panel or a TN, I guess.
 
Some stuff I just found. If your monitor uses the same panel as this one (seems likely):
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en/ho/WF05a/20491-314293-314303-314303-314303-12426180.html

Then it is a TN

One thing to note, though, I have read that TN panels have been moving to 8-bit, whereas PVA panels have been going the cheap way and the cheaper ones are 6-bit.

I just bought a rather cheap laptop for my friend (around $700+tax, but it has a Turion x2 1.6 GHz and 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD), and the screen's color reproduction is horrendous, and color and contrast shifting is abominable as well. But I ran some tests to check dithering, and I couldn't find any indication of it. I think it is an 8-bit panel, although my tests were rather informal (it is not my laptop after all). I did calibrate it with a Spyder 2, and the colors got better and more saturated, but nothing can help the horrible (usable) viewing angles.
 
yea it is my first lcd panel and plus its hooked up to a vga cable so that might be making the colors even worse then what they should be. im not sure what the difference is between TN and PVA but i know its an TFT display so im thinking its just a TN LCD. this is basically the same monitor that is in the hp w2007 and w2207 its just a bit smaller. i thought about getting the hp w2007 but the only one at walmart was opened and i was looking at 19inch widescreens for a while before that anyways. it was only about $240 with tax and everything so i thought it would be a better one then the Acer or whatever it was that walmart had there for like $200. my computer is HP and ive had it for years so i like HPs stuff. im in the process of building a new computer so this is pretty much for that. its just weird getting used to this display when im so used to a regular size CRT monitor. so the LCD plus the wide screen is a big change for me. im using that windows cleartype it seems to make the text look clearer then just standard. i bet it will look really good on my new computer when im able to use a DVI cable with the video card im getting for that comp. the colors are really close to the CRT monitor just some shades that i remember a certain color on some web pages are a little different in color now. i could never use the 1024x768 resolution on my old monitor but it seems alot better on this with the wider screen. i dunno i was just wondering if there was a way to make it so the colors looked the same as they were on the CRT monitor. ive tried messing with all of the setting and i got the contrast and brightness to about what i was used to. i think this was a good buy it seems alot better then some of the other LCD monitors that ive seen. the screen looks more like glass because its so glossy i can see the little reflection of my tv behind me. what i think is really funny is that my tv is a little 14 RCA trueflat tube thats smaller then my computer screen LOL.
 
Pretty much every monitor has different colors, so you really don't know which one has the "true" colors until you have calibrated them. Ideally, you need a colorimeter and some software, but that could run you from about $80 (for an automatic calibration) to $200 for fully manual, and multi-monitor (calibrates 2 monitors on the same system). The Pantone Huey is really cheap at Amazon right now, but if you're doing some photography, I'd recommend at least the new Huey pro, it's less expensive at Newegg.

But if you're gonna spend $100, you might as well spend $20 more and get the Eye One LT, it is cheaper at 17photo.com. Although, at this point, the Huey pro being recently released, I am unsure as to what the exact differences with the Eye-One Display LT are.

There really is no other way (other than to get really, REALLY lucky) to get accurate colors. You can try free software choices like Adobe Gamma, but they're not really very good. They could be useful if you just wanna sort of match two monitors, but I don't even know if it supports two monitors on the same system. If you have two computers, you could easily do it, but still they would only sort of match, and only between themselves. The minute you look at another monitor, they will probably be different, even if that monitor is hardware-calibrated.
 
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
i used a cleartype tuning thing that i found and things seem a little better for fonts and stuff and i switched the colors down to 16 bit in the windows setting since i thought it would make it look clearer since the monitor isn't getting the colors to dither to. i dunno i guess ill just get used to it and ill see how it looks on my new computer when i get the rest of the parts here :) :p
 
Don't use 16-bit color in Windows. Just use 32-bit. Those bit numbers things take into account all three colors. When we talk about an 8-bit panel, we mean 8 bits per each red, green and blue channel. That means 256 shades of R, G and B, which combined, come up to 2^8 x 2^8 x 2^8 = 256x256x256 = 16777216 total colors. In that case, Windows would tell you "24-bit color" (8 x 3). When Windows tells you "16-bit color", it means 16-bit total, like two of the color channels get 5 bits, and one of them gets 6 bits, for a total of 2^5 x 2^5 x 2^6 = 32x32x64 = 65536 colors.

When Windows tells you 32-bit color, that actually doesn't mean 32-bit color. That means 24-bit color plus 8-bit alpha channel, which are transparency levels, to put it simply. So you get 8-bit per each R, G and B channel, times 8-bit transparency levels (256 levels) for a total of what Windows calls "32-bit".

Another thing, Cleartype does nothing to color, it is just a technique to smooth out fonts on LCDs. It works better with a digital connection, and you might be better off with it, but it doesn't affect color.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top