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Graphics Software

Rearranging Pixels For Performance 149

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i'll-believe-it-when-I-see-it dept.
tepes writes "From bottomquark, A new method of sub-pixel rendering could make monitors cheaper to produce. ClairVoyante Laboratories developed the PenTile Matrix, which uses five sub-pixels instead of the typical three, to take advantage of the fact that the human eye is more sensitive to blue colors."
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Rearranging Pixels For Performance More

Rearranging Pixels For Performance

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  • It is not Blue (Score:5, Informative)

    by hottoh ( 540941 ) on Saturday December 29, 2001 @01:53PM (#2762575)
    The human eye is least sensitive to blue. It it most sensitive to green, followed by red then blue. R
    • Which is why in 16-bit color modes, you get 5 bits for red, 5 bits for blue and 6 bits for green. The human eye perceives more shades of green so that's where the extra bit goes.

    • Re:It is not Blue (Score:5, Informative)

      by Mr Thinly Sliced ( 73041 ) on Saturday December 29, 2001 @02:03PM (#2762624) Journal
      All they had to do was open a computer graphics text book to the section on colour spaces.

      Peaks are:
      Red at 630nm, green at 530nm, and blue at 450nm.

      Its kinda a bell curve at each, with green having greatest sensitivity, followed by red then blue.

      The human eye can distinguish about 128 different hues, and about 130 different tints (source Computer Graphics, Prentice Hall 1986).

      Mr Thinly Sliced
      • Check out the pretty graphs here [uc.edu] and here [photo.net]. Both show that red and green sensitivities are similar and different from blue. The two graphs seem to contradict each other - the first has blue the lowest, and the second has blue the highest, but they are graphing two things: the first shows sensitivity (excitability per # of photons) and the second shows the reciprical (# of photons to excite).
        • lol. Either my text books and my education are out of date, or this is something that people can't agree on.
          You can sleep safe in the knowledge that my comment will get modded down to -10 (Must be english used colour instead of color).
      • While it is a fact that eye is least sensitive to blue, the eye-brain combo IS very sensitive to this color. This is one of the reason for emergency vehicles having blue rotating lights.

    • Re:It is not Blue (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      True, and if anyone on slashdot actually reads the articles it's obvious from the layout of their matrix that blue indeed has the lowest priority in their product.
      • So you're saying that since we're already bad at seeing blue, they're justified in making blue even harder to see?

        I think you've got some backwards logic there.
    • the eye is most sensitive to *yellow* as in the color of the sun.

      • Re:It is not Blue (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        That's a subtractive primary, it has nothing to do with light. Yellow is red and green.
        • [Yellow] is a subtractive primary, it has nothing to do with light. Yellow is red and green.

          Actually, it has a lot to do with light. The yellow perception is caused by light with a specific wavelenght, which happens to be in the middle between red and green. Both red and green receptors are then stimulated, each one a bit less then with a full red or green light, and your brain compute the sum as a yellow color.
    • There is also an interesting (and rare) genetic condition that affects only women: the eye gets a "bonus" colour that is either another red or green, with a sensitivity curve slightly offset from the other red/green. While there may not be much of a difference in the two curves, it does allow the eye/brain to be more sensitive to colours in that part of the spectrum. Another reason to think that maybe women DO see more colours than guys.
    • we were taught in Colour Theory that the human eye has inferior spatial resolution in blue, but superior ability to discern brightness levels. We conducted several density grading experiments which seemed to prove this theory empirically. I think the confusion here is that the eye is most sensitive to green at the lower limits of perception - presumably because this ability might aid sight in poor light out in the bush. But that's just a guess.
    • Kmart would probably have something to say about that. ;-)
    • You're right of course, that's why the article says:
      "The human eye, however, perceives blue at a much lower resolution than red and green. Having the same number of red, green, and blue sub-pixels on a screen creates an image with more blue information than the eye can receive, so a percentage of that blue information is superfluous. "
      The whole concept is based on that fact. It's just CmdrTaco {mis|not }reading the article.
    • Do not confuse spatial accuity with contrast sensitivity. There is a lot of 'conventional wisdom' extrapolated from facts about human perception which has not been tested experimentally.

  • Natural lighting/blue (Score:2, Interesting)

    by perdida ( 251676 )
    The magic recipe will eventually be hit upon - monitors and video screens of very high quality will be produced cheaply, and people will begin putting them everywhere.

    There are many uses for ubiquitous screen technology. But the more video we see and watch during a day the closer we get to a certain question. Will the video representation of reality become more comfortable for people than the real thing?

    Many people already see more TV than they do real world outdoor imagery during a day. What happens when we all do? At least one issue to consider is that the cultural norms for the appearance of a healthy, sexually appealing human being will have even more to do with TV than they do today.
    • Many people already see more TV than they do real world outdoor imagery during a day. What happens when we all do?

      We end up at lenscrafters with nearsightedness. It happened to me after about three years of spending too much time at the computer and not taking breaks to view things at distance.

      • I don't believe myopia can be caused by environmental factors. It is a genetic phenomenon where the eye is simply too long.
        • Do a google search on "The forbidden Stitch". I used:

          Blind the forbidden stitch
          • That is not myopia. Myopia is a genetic condition caused by an elongated eye.
            • Genetic condition? I doubt it. Unless something really went wrong in Singapore. Myopia seems almost endemic there. http://www.snec.com.sg/cec/childhood_myopia.htm

              Myopia appears to be a result of too much "near work" - e.g. reading, watchmaking, embroidery. More environmental factors. Based on what I've observed that seems to be a far more plausible explanation.

              There could be a genetic predisposition to _developing_ myopia after too much "near work". But "near work" seems to be the trigger. In fact I think it could be the other way round - e.g. some lucky people have genetic predisposition to not get myopia even after lots of "near work". So far scientists/doctors need to explore more on how a human eye develops/grows and maintains focus during that growth I believe they will find answers there - there are probably feedback loops and lots of close work could screw them up.

              Personally I am not an eye doctor but I think that more kids are learning how to read at earlier ages, and their arms are just too short to put books at appropriate focal lengths comfortably! "Hold book 1.5-2 feet away" Yeah right, not easy when your arms aren't even that long, esp for precocious kids.

              Someone should create special reading optics for those kids! Too late for me tho :(.

      • unlikely (Score:3, Informative)

        by Preposterous Coward ( 211739 )
        Real nearsightedness is myopia, caused basically by an incorrectly shaped eyeball.

        You probably experienced presbyopia, which is the gradual loss of flexibility in your lenses, thus making near items harder to focus on. This is a normal process that occurs with age.

        Admittedly, looking at a monitor all day long can cause eyestrain, especially if you tend toward hyperopia (farsightedness) to begin with. That's my problem: While I can see all right at distances of a couple feet from my face and beyond, my eye muscles have to strain constantly, even when I'm focused at infinity, and working on a computer screen all day every day makes the strain get really bad if I'm not wearing my glasses.

  • I am still waiting for this to happen...it seems that they might be getting closer with the technology, but what obstacles still need to be faced?
  • It may reduce cost in your traditional monitor, but does it give enough of a weight decrease to make monitors ubiquitous? Until we can reduce price and weight to such a point that monitors can, as horrifying as the thought may be to anyone with any ecological conscience, be a disposable item. I want my digital paper. I've been waiting 10 years. Will it be another 10?

  • Great (Score:3, Funny)

    by mESSDan ( 302670 ) on Saturday December 29, 2001 @02:01PM (#2762607) Homepage
    I can see this is probably going to be like mp3 compression, where people often say "I can tell the difference between that and the original". So, someone will have to develop something silly like "monitor drivers with more blue!"
    • No need for new drivers. Just change the gamma correction for the blue (this is available on all calibration savvy monitor.)

      And this won't solve the problem of people whining really. First, people whining are doomed to whine all the time. Second, it's not because you amplify a signal on a smaller surface that you can correct for the flaw. If it work that way they would have already manufactured the monitors with the blue component every other pixel. The main problem is the pattern in that case. Images are linearely digitized and rendered. Displaying these images on that type of monitor would light colors in the "wrong" place. To give the best effect, images would have to be processed thru a adjustment filter to account for the pattern (is this a valid patent case? Dunno, but if you think so and are a lawier, please contact me ;-)

      PPA, the girl next door

  • Summary. (Score:4, Informative)

    by mindstrm ( 20013 ) on Saturday December 29, 2001 @02:01PM (#2762611)
    As with all slashdot posts, the posting is inaccurate.

    The human eye is *least* sensitive to blue... that's what this thing is about, sort of.

    It's also not a new method of sub-pixel rendering.. it's a new method of sub-pixel layout.

    The theory is that in a conventional LCD, there is too much blue.. it's wasted space, resources, etc.
    This thing both changes the color proportion, and the way the thing is wired up. adjacent subpixels of the same color are driven by the same driver.
    • It's not so much that we are less sensitive to blue.. that would seem to suggest you need MORE blue..
      It's that we percieve blue at a lower resolution than the other colors, due to wavelength. (Ever seen blueblocker sunglasses? There is truth to that). So there is no reason to have the same resolution of R, G, and B, the extra resolution on B is wasted (not brightness, just resolution)
      • It's not due to the wavelength. The wavelengths of visible light are mesured in nano meters. Most LCD pixles are mesured in millimeters (well, fractions of mllimeters I guess)

        The reason we need less resolution on blue is because blue isn't picked up by our eyes as well.
        • I think you completely misunderstood what I meant.

          Why do you think blue isn't picked up by your eyes as well? DUH! WAVELENGTH!
          Blue does not focus at the same distance as the other colors, by enough of a margin to make excess blue make images seem fuzzy.

          Sheesh.

          • Re:That's exactly right. (Score:3, Informative)

            by pmc ( 40532 )
            Why do you think blue isn't picked up by your eyes as well? DUH! WAVELENGTH!
            Blue does not focus at the same distance as the other colors, by enough of a margin to make excess blue make images seem fuzzy.

            The reason the eye is less sensitive to blue is that there are far fewer blue senstive cones than red or green. These blue cones are actually more sensitive to light than the red or green ones, but their deficit in numbers more that conteracts this.

            Additionally most blue cones are outside the fovea (the bit of the eye that has the highest density of colour perception cells) so they are thinly spread, and this spread makes the resolution of the blue image poor.

            But even this is not the end of the story - the brain does all sorts of visual image processing tricks and the blue signal seems to be amplified to compensate.

            Finally the focus bit - blue has a different focus to red and green in the eye, so the image will always be a bit blurred. This is probably the reason why there are so few cones in the fovea - the image would be blurred anyway and your vision would not improve even if you increased the number of cones.

  • What about text? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by michaelmalak ( 91262 ) <michael@michaelmalak.com> on Saturday December 29, 2001 @02:03PM (#2762620) Homepage
    Won't this make fonts look even more fuzzy and have more "jaggies"? Why aren't there any 3072x2304 monochrome laptops available? Doesn't anyone else think it's a good goal to have dynamic paper-quality images rather than pixels we are able to casually count?
  • Sub-pixel addressing schemes (as used by Microsoft ClearType) won't work with this setup.

    I'd rather pay a bit extra and have the option of using ClearType (or some other application that can exploit sub-pixel addressing).

    Vx

  • Isn't this the same technology/technique that Windows XP uses to smooth fonts on LCD displays (CLEARTYPE)???
    • No it's not. Do a google search on CLEARTYPE to find pages describing the technique that the Apple ][ was using (Woz == God) and that M$ tried to patent twenty years after.

      But that's funny you mention that, because CLEARTYPE using the contiguous alternation of red green and blue on the screen WON'T work with this new thing. And because MS had to go to the trouble of many thousand hours of user testing to optimize CLEARTYPE, expect them to anti-market this type of technology (as they clearly did with BlueTooth in XP.)

      One more point: Is it me or the figure showing the pattern shows the blue as covering pretty much as much as the other components?

      My concern (if the figure is not right), does that work for people who are colorblind or are more sensitive to blue than the average user population?

      Finally just a question: why did they stop here, as green is perceived twice as much as red and red is perceived twice as much as blue (roughtly.) Can anyone on /. think about a pattern that would represent this even better scheme?

      PPA, the girl next door.
      • No it's not. Do a google search on CLEARTYPE to find pages describing the technique that the Apple ][ was using (Woz == God) and that M$ tried to patent twenty years after.

        Do another search, and you'll find the pages where Steve Gibson *retracted* that statement. The Apple II didn't have subpixel rendering. It simply used its pixel generator to create colors on top of a black & white NTSC signal by having a high enough resolution that the bandwidth of the signal crossed over into the area reserved for chroma data.

        There's a big difference there.

        Try reading the actual ClearType papers too -- there's a LOT of engineering behind ClearType, including the use of conceptual 'perfect' display which is down-transformed to match the actual display, and then reverse-transformed to allow tuning to match the conceptual display as much as possible (ie. with a minimum of signal loss). All heavy signal processing stuff.

        Simon

  • That is a horrible article, the source is better (Score:5, Informative)

    by victim ( 30647 ) on Saturday December 29, 2001 @02:17PM (#2762685)
    The linked article is awful. You will not understand PenTiles from it. Go to the source [clairvoyante.com] to get the facts.

    Briefly...
    • Human perception has lower spatial resolution for blue, so have fewer blue pixles. this has nothing to do with intensity sensitivity.
    • Apparently the column drivers on an LCD cost more than the row drivers. I have no idea why, but I will accept that. The pentiles use twice as many row drivers for red and green to boost the spatial resolution without requiring more column drivers.
    • Much like cleartype, they can position pixels on other than the natural boundaries to accomplish subpixel effects. The example on the page is a special case of a single white point. Mostly this will be useful for smoothing edges.

    It is a really well written desription, it is a shame Design Engineering didn't have an writer that could understand it.
    • Design Engineering's 'article' looked like a cheap hack of a press release to me... If it wasn't, it was blatant plagarism- look at the wording of the two pages.
    • Apparently the column drivers on an LCD cost more than the row drivers. I have no idea why, but I will accept that.

      It may have to do with the order that the row and column are printed in. If the rows are printed first, and the LCD has defects at that point, you only lose the time and money that went into the first few steps. Then if the Columns are printed later, and the LCD has defects, you lose that much more time and process cost. Thus minimizing the complexity and reducing the chance of defects in later printing stages is a wise move, from an economical standpoint.

      At the fab I briefly contracted for, no one cared if you dropped the US$10 raw wafers, but people flipped out if you dropped the US$300 processed wafers that came out of the implanter 8 hours later...

  • Shouldn't that read "is LESS sensitive to blue"? (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The human eye is less sensitive to blue.. That's why blue is often used as a background color, and why yellow (absense of blue) text on a white background is hard to read.

  • similar to a recent dead-tree concept (Score:3, Interesting)

    by invictus ( 83837 ) on Saturday December 29, 2001 @02:22PM (#2762698) Homepage Journal
    In the printing industry there has been a big trumpetting of a new dot layout
    called Hexachrome. This takes the concept of the human eye's propensity
    for blurring colors together and adjusts the traditional 3 dot 3 color priniting
    layout to 6 dots with a red dot, a blue dot, and 4 different types of yellow/green.
    Personally, this looks like a migration from paper to the computer
    industry of this same technique which affords more vibrant colors and
    cleaner details.

    • Re:similar to a recent dead-tree concept (Score:4, Informative)

      by MegaGremlin ( 216264 ) on Saturday December 29, 2001 @02:42PM (#2762759) Homepage Journal
      Hexacrome is not exactly new.
      Pantone Hexachrome is a six-color ultra high-fidelity process for enhanced color reproduction.
      Introduced in 1995, Hexachrome includes a new ink set, separations, proofing, and color selector. The proprietary ink set developed by Pantone consists of enhanced versions of the subtractive primaries yellow, magenta, and cyan, along with black, orange, and green inks.
      Original Article [quark.com]

      Bolding in block quote is mine.
      • In the print industry, Hexachrome is indeed new and revolutionary.

        This is, after all, an industry that was invented in the 15th century, and didn't substantially change until the 19th century, when roll paper and continuous-run presses were finally invented. That's 400 years without earth-shaking technological revolution.

        It was almost a hundred more years until moveable type was invented, and nearly fifty more before colour offset printing became common.

        A printing technology like Hexachrome is, indeed, very new, and still struggling to gain acceptance -- it's a radical idea!
        • You're wrong. Hexachrome is neither new nor revolutionary.

          The process of creating colors by overlaying color halftones in a rosette, that was new and revolutionary. Hexachrome is just another way of doing that same thing. Six colors instead of four, but the same idea.

          If I had to pick something going on right now that is closest to being called revolutionary, I'd choose stochastic screening. Us computer types know it better as dithering. Basically, instead of printing dots in a pattern and varying their sizes to give the impression of tone, stochastic screening prints equally sized-- and very small-- spots of color, but places them randomly, varying their distribution to produce tones.

          Personally, I haven't cared too much for the stochastic samples I've seen, but that's a matter of execution and preference. It may be that stochastic printing will have a lot going for it as the process of generating the screens becomes more refined.
      • 1995 is extremely new in the printing industry! The printing industry moves pretty slowly - not least because the printers are very expensive, so replacing them isn't done casually...
    • Printing has a different set of problems. The basic problem is that printing ink on top of ink isn't really "subtractive". The relationship is more complicated. Inks have at least a reflective color and an opacity. It's hard to get saturated colors with translucent inks. The most common need is for a good, solid, black. Hence four-color printing. Adding some really saturated colors to the system lets you go further out in the saturation direction.

      Better color printers for computers are six colors now. Finally, you can get saturated reds.

      None of this applies to light-emitting screens, which really are additive.

  • So now we get the lovely blury pixles of CRTs on LCD. Wonderfull.

    Personaly, I'd rather stick with a nice crisp display.
  • "take advantage of the fact that the human eye is more sensitive to blue colors"

    This is why the feminine species has not taken notice of my swoon-worthy masculinity-- 'tis for the fact that I am partial the lower frequencies.

    It all makes sense now. . .

  • the summary gets it wrong (Score:3, Informative)

    by markj02 ( 544487 ) on Saturday December 29, 2001 @02:43PM (#2762762)
    They are using blue not because of sensitivity, but because, as they say,
    A principle disadvantage of the triad is the reliance of the blue pixel to carry high-resolution luminance information, a task that it cannot fulfill due to limitations in the human vision system.

    Rearranging the color pixels for color stealing is a reasonable idea, and making blue a little bigger is a nice tweak. Is it worth it? That's difficult to say. Subpixel rendering using color stealing on current LCDs actually does roughly put the extra resolution where you want it for high resolution text--vertical lines are the problem in small text, no horizontal lines.
  • I would be interested in any new technology which would reduce eye stress, seeing that I sit in front of a monitor for about 10hrs/wk. Does anybody know the impact of this development on my "end-of-the-workweek" blurry vision :)

  • Not only is the eye less sensitive to blue (as about 40 posts have pointed out), but have you ever noticed that the eye (at least mine) has more trouble focusing on blue? i.e. driving at night I'm always baffled by lit corporate signs that are a deep blue that just looks blurry and fuzzy, while a red sign at the same distance is crisp and clear. Of course it could be just a fault in my own eyes, but I've heard from other people who've noticed the same.

    • It's not just you, that's how human vision works in general, and it's exactly the effect this new layout exploits. There are fewer blue pixels (which are therefore further apart) because our spatial perception of blue is less exact than of red/green. In effect, since we can't see the higher resolution of blue, why provide it? Having the same number of blue pixels as red or green is wasting a lot of pixels -- due to the "bluriness" in which we perceive blue, there's no point in having that many blue pixels -- we can't tell the difference between that and only having half as many blue pixels.
      • There are ~ 7^6 cones and 1.2^8 rods in the eye. I suspect that the spatial perception for blue color is reduced because the rods are pretty insensitive to blue. The rods are of course monochromatic. But the information from rods and cones is combined in the retina.

    • Simple explanation (Score:2, Informative)

      by jeti ( 105266 )
      The human eye has two different types of photoreceptors called cones and rods. Cones
      come in three variations for color vision.
      But they don't perform too well in low light
      conditions.

      Rods can only perceive green or yellow light
      and are much more sensitive.

      That's why your color vision is reduced at
      night and it's why it's so hard to see blue
      stuff in low color conditions.
    • One of the first things I learned in photography was that reds and oranges appear to come toward the viewer, with violets and blues appear to move away from the viewer. A quick glance at a lot of the old Kodak advertisments and you will always see a red or orange in the foreground, and blues and greens as the background. This gives the feeling of depth on a flat image. Apply this to digital imaging and you have a jpg iwith what appears to have depth. In black and white it becomes a little more obvious by placing the lighter colors to the front, and the darker colors toward the back. I would have to assume that the same applies to colors on the screen, as color is still color regardless if it's reflective or projected. (as in CRT monitors)

  • Doh! What about us colorblind folks? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cmckay ( 25124 ) <cameron.mckay @ c o lorado.edu> on Saturday December 29, 2001 @02:50PM (#2762787) Homepage
    Okay, I agree that this technology is cool, but I think I would still opt for a traditional LCD display. I'm red-green colorblind, so I am most sensitive to blue, rather than red or green as this display assumes.

    I'm surprised that nobody else has posted about colorblindness yet-- I was under the impression that more of us engineering types were affected!
    • Are you sure about that? I doubt very much you see red or green at a lower resolution than blue. This display should look crisper to you than a traditional LCD display, even if you can't tell the red pixels from the green pixels.

      I was under the impression that more of us engineering types were affected!

      Than the general populace, to a statistically significant degree? I find this highly unlikely.

    • cmckay:
      Okay, I agree that this technology is cool, but I think I would still opt for a traditional LCD display. I'm red-green colorblind, so I am most sensitive to blue, rather than red or green as this display assumes.

      You're sensitive to blue-yellow difference but not red-green difference. Your blue-yellow spatial resolution will as spectacularly crap as it is for all humans, but your yellow spatial resolution will be fine. The Pentile matrix will be as just as a bonus to you as it will be for, um, trichromats. I'm not sure how it will affect the blue-yellow-colour-blind people though.

    • I'm surprised that nobody else has posted about colorblindness yet-- I was under the impression that more of us engineering types were affected!

      I once read an interesting write-up on color blindness on (of all places) Wendy Carlos' page (you know, the Wendy Carlos that did the music for Tron??) at www.wendycarlos.com. She even suggests how to simulate red-green color blindness with a deep blue fluorescent light and a (low pressure, not high pressure) sodium vapor light. And somebody must have had color blind people in mind when the HP-65 calculator was designed, as all the buttons are ivory, gray and black, with the function keys being yellow and light blue. (Of course, the red display would appear as yellow.)
  • For example, in the case of a 15' 1600 x 1200 UXGA panel

    Good God man! This would look great behind a 12" stonehenge...
  • Won't this screw up Cleartype [grc.com]? At least until they have an option to support this particular sub-pixel organization. Does Cleartype support multiple sub-pixel orderings right now? Although this seems like it would be a bit more complex, since the ordering changes not just on the x axis, but is differently laid out on the y axis as well.

    Sounds like an interesting problem. I wonder how much information modern lcd displays give the cpu about their sub-pixel layout.

    Which brings me to another question -- I wonder if anyone has looked into designing an image format which contained extra data to allow sub-pixel display layout of the image? Or whether there are any image display programs that take advantage of sub-pixel layout when scaling. Or further, hardware scaling routines on laptops (for when you're at lower resolution) that use it. (On the other hand, images are probably more color sensitive than text, so this might not work nearly as well).

    Well, random thoughts.

    -Puk
    • Won't this screw up Cleartype [grc.com]? At least until they have an option to support this particular sub-pixel organization.

      Perhaps with this scheme, you won't need to use cleartype; Between this and the intelligent drivers which overdrive the display for fractions of their ramp time to achieve quicker response, you should be able to get a crisp, clear, low-persistence display without having to do any special antialiasing tricks. At least, if they're not bullshitting us.

  • Actualy the Human eye is 30% more sensitive to Green then Blue and Red. We can see more shades of green then any other colour. This is why Night Vision and HUD's on jets are Green.

  • In 1953, the National Television System Committee was given the task of implementing a 3:1 compression scheme that could be decoded with a couple of extra vacuum tubes. All the frequencies had been assigned to work with simple black and white televisions. Furthermore, the new color signals had to work with unmodified black and white television sets, a large existing installed base.

    The engineering that they did for this was completely brilliant and used the same kind of reasoning about the perceptual properties of the human eye that this product does. It got the job done. And we've been suffering the consequences for fifty years. Anyone who has ever done serious animation for video knows about chroma crawl, notch and comb filters, antialiasing along several different color axes at once, yada yada yada.

    With LCD's and decent CRT's, we've been able to get away from most of that, unless you really need to put your signal on a television set. And so now, to save a few bucks on something that is going quickly down in price anyway, we're going to be hobbled for another fifty years because of some "clever" idea? This is progress?

    • Good comment!

      Don't worry, it's not adopted yet. These guys would have to be backep up by all the LCD fabs in the world. and the money they would save to these big manufacturers would probably be used to pay their licensing rights.

      PPA, the girl next door.

  • Dubious Graphics (Score:3, Informative)

    by KFury ( 19522 ) on Saturday December 29, 2001 @04:33PM (#2763061) Homepage
    Checking out the linked page [clairvoyante.com], there are explanatory graphics midway down, but they're simply wrong. They show an enlarged letter A, (black on white) then show how that letter is formed on 'stripe' CRTs vs their tile system. The problem is that they have it reversed. They show the color phosphor dots on the black areas and the white areas are still white. The more fundamental difference here is that CRTs are additive, while LCD displays are subtractive, but they don't even go into that.

    Worse, they base their assumptions of superiority on the misconception that striped CRT monitors have one trio of RGB stripes for each pixel. They don't even address the triangular RGB phosphor pattern that non-trinitron CRTs use.

    In a nutshell, it sounds like a neat idea, but it's no panacea, and looks like it'll have many of the same edge-color problems that current CRTs do (Trinitron and non), only they'll be more obvious on 45deg angles of red and green surfaces, rather than 90deg angles. Take a look at the tile pattern, and see how the pattern does still have stripes, only they're rotated 45degrees right for green and 45 degrees left for red. I imagine a field of 100% blue will, on close inspection, be a thousand little points of light, since each one is surrounded by dark space that takes up 70% of the screen.

    Of course, the proof is in the pudding. I wonder when they'll have samples at tradeshows.
    • Go ahead and ignore all but the first paragraph of my post. I was stupid.

      The part about the 'A' graphic still stands though.

      • Nope, your first paragraph goes away, too. They're talking specifically about LCD monitors, and I quote:

        Shown above is 8-point font type rendered on LCD screens, magnified to show its structure.

        Where does it say that they're rendering on CRTs there? I'm sorry, but your whole post is invalid. Too bad you can't just remove it, or at least edit it. Silly Slashdot.
        • Nope, I still stand by my first paragraph (minus the last sentence). LCD, CRT, or projector, white is made up by the combination of R, G, and B. Black is made up by the absence of all three. The 'A' graphics are bogus, no two ways about it.
    • Taking into account your own disclaimer-reply, I still wonder about the last sentence of your first paragraph. How do you figure that LCDs are subtractive? AFAIK, the only difference is that the phosphor arrangement is different than on CRTs. If the color theory were different, then a magnifier would show CMY color elements, instead of the same RGB as on a standard TV.

      BTW, the proof of the pudding is in the eating... the proof is not in the pudding.

      • You're absolutely right. In my self-deprecation, I didn't say "Pay attention to only the first paragraph, and even then, ignore the last sentence." I realized that was wrong as well, but I didn't want to overcomplicate. ;-)

        Actually, LCDs are subtractive *and* additive. They take white light and strain out the proper color, then they add those colors back together.

      • Re:Dubious Graphics (Score:3, Informative)

        by TinWeasle ( 538284 )

        Doh!

        Ok, guys, here it is. CYMK is not a light tranmission system, it is a light reflection system. It reflects selected colors in white light, not produces them. RGB is a transmissive scheme using the filtered color of direct light.

        As a long time graphics guy, I constantly get in harrangues with people who insist on wasting huge amounts of money and time on "color matching" monitors and the like. IMNSHO, it simply cannot be done! The only way of knowing what the exact color you will get off a press is going to be is to use a software solution like Pantone CMS. You have to learn to ignore the color on the screen, since, at best, it can only be an approximation, and still leaves room for error in brightness/contrast, to what the press will produce. The way to get accurate color from the press is to print a test strip, using known Pantone values, from a file generated on the computer in question, then use that test strip as a guide. Of course, time and operating factors will take the press out of true with the strip eventually, but the press can be recalibrated accurately to known inked color values. WYSIWYG in color spaces for computer generated graphics is a dangerous hook to hang your hat on. It often simply is wrong. Earthtones, especially, are hard to predict without a matching system that transmits press commands by known values, which is why you will find a Pantone swatch key in nearly every serious (print destined) graphics deskdrawer.

        Whew! I am not trying to rant, but the two color spaces are so different as to make me have this pet peeve. You will never see any kind of "CYMK monitor". Physics just don't work that way. The differences in CRT and LCD, as far as color goes, is minimal. The CRT pumps light through a filter system of phosphor pixels, and the LCD uses a backlight to let you see light filtered through a filter system of Liquid Crystal Display elements. (or is it "Liquid Crystal Diode?? I am getting old...)

        • people who insist on wasting huge amounts of money and time on "color matching" monitors and the like. IMNSHO, it simply cannot be done!

          Agreed. The limited gamut of a CRT or LCD compared to the press guarantees that if nothing else. However, it makes sense to use colour matching where possible to achieve as close an approximation as possible. The only question then becomes how much do you spend, and how close an approximation do you want? The closer the approximation, the more it'll cost (rising almost exponentially :-)

  • If they take advantage of how the eye views color, how does that affect those of us who are colorblind? I read somewhere that 1 in 10 males have some sort of color perception problem.
  • Microsoft has a bullshit patent on sub pixel rendering of text on LCD screens. I'll bet going to another pixel layout circumvents it and lets other companies write sub pixel rendering drivers without getting sued by big evil.

    God, those patents are dumb. Of course you could find prior art, like the way every Apple II programmer drew fonts. I played with sub pixel rendering on my first color laptop just because it was such an obvious thing to try and it used to be my job to play with graphics...

    Oh well enough whining. I'm a hypocrite, anyway. If my company puts my name on any software patents I won't complain about it, I'll be too busy wondering if that means that I'm getting a raise.

    Rocky J. Squirrel

  • I wouldn't hold my breath (Score:3, Interesting)

    by qanuta ( 266533 ) on Saturday December 29, 2001 @08:38PM (#2763598)
    I note the date on the ClairVoyante web page is 1999. They've had this for a while, and still nothing's coming of it....
  • Anyone who has done focusing on a large CRT projector can tell you the blue tube is a biatch. No matter how sharp you get the focus on blue the lines always appear fuzzy.
  • They have it right - they know that we're insensitive to blue. If you read the description, you'll notice that pixels are defined as two green and two red dots. The idea is that the green and red dots will define the edges of the pixel, and the blue dot just adds color information. That's pretty clever. I wonder if some graphics will get a "blue halo" effect as the blue dots are lit up around the perimeter of a shape. It's probably not caught on, because it would require writing custom drivers for every OS out there. You'd have to write one thing to display the regular dots, and another thing to handle subpixel rendering for text.
  • I don't like this layout. With the original triangular layout you could always find a triangle red Green and Blue. Using this layout you will not alway get blue next to green. I think this will show up in the final product.

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