Apple hit with another "millions of colors" lawsuit - Page 3

Folks, I've been around Macs for a long time. In the past, Apple's quality was unquestionable. There was simply nothing like the attention to detail that put into the smallest of things like the key action on your keyboard. Now, it's evident that Apple has been cutting corners. Everytime you see a teardown of a new product, you see obvious cost saving measures. This was never the Apple way.

So, what if the iMac is the bottom of the line? So those that don't like moving the cursor over acres of screen real estate to access the menubar has to be punished? Apple products cost a premium. Apple users have long been willing to pay that premium because they've gotten quality parts, the Mac user experience is second to none, and there's something about just being different and owning a Mac. But now they keep lowering the standards on us in the name of profit.

Apple needs to be held accountable. Macs are used by design professionals everyday. The screens, if attached, need to be usable for that type of work. When you're in the prepress business, color variations mean a lot. When Apple touts that their colors are accurate, they better be accurate.

Honestly, I say the Mac community needs to make plenty of noise about the ever cheapening of the Mac. It's the only way we can force the company to make the products better.

Sorry but i fail to see why after reading that page you get to the conclusion that both screens have the same kind of panel. It is like reading THIS and getting to the conclusion that both models, 20" and 24", weigh the same.


Apple machines used to be prohibitively expensive but they are not anymore. So expecting the same quality is not possible.

And if you need to do professional work then buy a pro machine and not a consumer one.

It looks like the choices were:

Make the 17" even cheaper, retaining the 6-bit panel (although it doesn't sell so well)
Make the 17" more expensive, with an 8-bit panel
Make a 20" cheaper than the existing 17", retaining the 6-bit tech
Make a 20" with an 8-bit panel, leaving nothing at the price point of the old 17"
Make a 17" AND a 20" model

And on the marketing front, how to talk up the 6-bit dithered display? It's shit but cheap? You won't notice the difference? Displays millions of colours, well, looks exactly like it does, but doesn't calibrate so well?

There's a lot of (justified) moaning, but out of interest, if you were Apple, what would you have done at the time of the product transition?

Cheers,

Martin.

Um, yeah - the page shows different viewing angles, resolutions, brightness AND contrast...

The only common claims are that they're TFT's with millions of colours.

Cheers,

Martin.

No, Apple used to use completely proprietary technology like NuBus cards, ADB, etc. that caused such high prices. When they switched to USB, Firewire, and PCI, the cost of the technology came down considerably. Now, the use of the open x86 platform has further reduced cost, all thanks to mass production of such technologies.

Even after the switch to more affordable technology, Apple still commands a premium. Price a nice 24" iMac and compare what you could get from Alienware for the same money. It's night and day. Now, I know the iMac is made from more expensive laptop components, and it's not an apples to Apple comparison, but you get the drift.

As far as the pro work and pro machines, I got out of the prepress industry some time ago, but do you realize how expensive it is to use nothing but Mac Pros and Cinema Displays? Back when I was in, we had everything from top of the line Quadras to low line Performas at the shop, depending on the job you were doing. Because of Apple's former high standards in the hardware department, and the fact that you had a separate monitor, this was doable. Their claims of such high quality displays, no doubt, has caused many people to buy without realizing they've been duped.

The iMacs are very competitively priced being even cheaper than similar all-in-one offerings by Dell, Sony, etc.


I know it is expensive but as I said if you want to do pro work you should not get a consumer model.

Jeez, if you can reach the apple site you can also google "iMac 20" teardown" which by August 9th Kodawarisan had already done and let everyone know that the panel was a
LG Philips LM201WE3...a TN panel and that info was all over the net on Apple and camera sites like DP Review. So there's a whole 2 day window from launch to widespread knowledge that the 20" had a 6 bit + A-FRC TN panel (spec'd by LG.Philips to 16.7M colors - so I guess A-FRC is the same as Hi-FRC) and the 24" had a S-IPS.

Anyway, here's a powerpoint document describing how FRC and Hi-FRC works:

http://prohardver.hu/dl/rev/2007-03/...ccz/hi-frc.pdf

A little hard to follow in a few places but I think most folks here can figure it out.

Either way...the 6 bit panels CAN do millions of colors. The downside is that they do so with some artifacting (banding/dithering in gradients/flicker/etc) visible on some images to some folks.

They've always had the inferior panels in the cheapest iMac model. They have put better ones in the larger iMac. So it's not necessarily that the $2000 model necessarily has the TN panel.

Of all things in the world that is wrong RIGHT now, this lawsuit important in what ways?

False advertsing isn't new people! Yes, Apple should be held accountable and have their "words" corrected. First settlement isn't enough, now we have more leechers trying to get a piece of Apple's piece? If you FEEL so victimized by Apple, for everyone's sake STOP buying their products.

Our own government lied to us about Middle East war and what are we doing? Protests? Maybe we should start suing Bush and Congress to get some results in this country!

I think that's framing the argument though. Apple choses to make the all-in-one type because it's the most expensive kind of consumer desktop.

So get a $1199 or $1499 20" iMac and add a S-IPS monitor of your choice except, alas, the 30". Then again the iMac only went to 24" anyway. I guess you could do the Dell 27" but it's S-PVA.

I think the summary is that it when it gets 8 bit input, it shows 6, and uses the top two and a synthetically generated one to create an extra three.

It displays the six, and uses the three extra to control the pixel brightness (on-off) over a four-frame time period, so the table from the PDF has:

6 bit 8 bit
0 0
0.25 1
0.50 2
0.75 3
1 4

And the human eye blends the change in luminance over the four frames, in a similar way to how the sub-pixels blend into a single colour.

We'll see what the court says I suppose, assuming Apple don't settle again.

How many computer purchasers are going to do that? How many are even going to think of doing that?



yeah "widespread" amongst all us Apple geeks here. Certainly not widespread amongst the rest of the world's computer-buying population. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence in this thread that even this story's "revelation" of the 20" being TN was news to some people, despite it quickly following previous stories about the iMac's LCD panels.


No, the specifications page show that. The information page clearly implies both screens deliver equal-quality images; they do not. It is simple - Apple's information page is misleading. Is anyone here brazen enough to try and argue it wouldn't be clearer if Apple just stated straight-up that one panel is TN and the other IPS?

I dunno why pro users wouldn't do the proper research before a major purchase. They all should know they want high quality panels for their work so making sure that they have the monitor they need seems like one of the top purchasing criteria.

Google IS widespread. iMac and panel is not a hard pair of keywords to think up either. Figuring out who the source for the panel would be high on my list of technical critera to find out and the limitations of TN panels is also widely known.

Also, if you're looking at iMacs you might have noticed that the previous 17" iMac had a TN panel and the 20" is now sitting in its space.

Digital camera forums also had the info and it wasn't hard to find if you looked.

It does not.

If they did provide that information at best it would be in the specs page and not the marketing information page.

Yes, it would be clearer but really, few manufacturers do that. Care to tell me what kind of panel the Dell UltraSharp 2408WFP uses using only the Dell site?

Sure it does. It provides one lot of text to cover both the 20" and 24" iMac. It makes no reference (direct or indirect) to the fact that the two machines use different technology panels.

It does not say at any point that both panels use the same technology either. It just says that pictures on the iMac screen look stunning because of its glossy display which has nothing to do with the quality of the panel.

If you use exactly the same text to describe the picture quality of two different machines, that in my book implies the picture quality of the two machines is identical. Since the picture quality is not identical, the provided information is misleading.

It does never talk about picture quality. It just states that pictures look stunning (rich, vivid colour) because of the glossy display.

Now that really does take the biscuit!

Pray tell, how is that text not talking about the picture quality of the display?

The fact that a glossy display enhances the colours has nothing to do with the quality of the picture.

Are the colours not an integral part of the picture?

I think you must be pulling my leg. This is some sort of April fools joke isn't it?

Yes they are. By enhancing the colours artificially using a glossy screen you get a picture that looks more appealing which is the only thing Apple claims in that page. It never states that both screens produce the same picture quality.

Yeah, the Mac is getting cheaper so the quality of the product is going to become cheaper. Its a sad consequence but if Apple dont drop their price when they change to Intel, normal home users will never buy Macs cause they dont see the value of a well build Mac (If they use PPC, people will assume its PPC which is causing the price of Macs to be expensive). Normal home people are buying iMacs now so professional should not get the lowest end Mac anymore since its catered for home users.

Im not blaming anybody but it would be nice if Apple could fit some proper displays into all their iMac line, besides, electronic parts price are dropping like water, it would not hurt Apple to invest in some quality displays. Thank god I will be doing my photography on a MBP.

Just a thought....Apple now has 150 stores. A very significant chunk of the market has ready access to walk in and directly look at the screens. Last time I looked the display on an iMac is not a hidden item. If you look at it and are satisfied with the picture and you choose to buy the product, I don't think you have much ground to sue.

That would be like strolling into the car dealership, picking out the "ocean mist" colored model and suing because it really didn't look like ocean mist at all.....

Still, I would like Apple to be more revealing in their specs.

With an external monitor presumably? The MBP screens are also TN panels (like all other laptops). If anyone knows of any laptop that doesn't use TN or something worse, I'd be interested to hear about it.

Ah, sorry, that's the one I thought we were talking about.


That would be completely meaningless on the info page without a friendly FAQ to explain the differences between the two screens -which are already documented on the specifications page.

What seems reasonable to me is to have an extra couple of lines on the spec page with something like:

24" - 16.7 million colors, S-IPS 8-bits per color channel
20" - 16.7 million colors, TN 6-bits per color channel with H-FRC enhancement

It's enough for those that care to look up the difference, and for most users to see they get the same number of colours, although the 24" "seems better".

Cheers,

Martin.

Indeed. But there's nothing wrong with a friendly FAQ. Better to be truthful with and educate your customers than try to obfuscate things with blurb implying the screens are the same whilst the specs contradict it.


Except arguably the most important difference, TN vs. IPS, is left out of the specs. page and only those really clued-up will realise that the lower viewing-angle of the 20" hints that the panel might be TN - it doesn't gaurantee it and most people would not think to further research the issue off Apple's site.

Simply stating TN panel for 20" and IPS panel for 24" in addition to the currently provided specs. is unequivocal; if folk don't know what the heck that means they can google/wiki those terms and educate themselves, and it'd be even better if Apple themselves provided the aforementioned "FAQ".


Agreed. I think however this should be coupled with having separate text for the 20" and 24" model on the display information page. The 20" page could talk-up response time and the 24" page colour accuracy. Or something.

I can't see this being a bad idea.

If I was in the market for an iMac, the difference in quality between the two models' displays would possibly sway me to buy the 24-inch instead. More money in Apple's coffers... Win win!

All it does is change what happens to the incident light. A matte screen would appear to wash out the contrast because it's catching all the diffuse light.

On the iMac, I don't think it makes much difference because it's the worst of both worlds, you have the glossy face covering a screen that has a matte surface.

Both treatments are artificial, most LCDs have one or the other, it is just that one treatment has a different effect than another. I wish LCDs used the reflection reduction coatings like what's on my CRTs, it's better than the standard gloss and better than the textured matte surface. The main downside is that it alters the colors of the reflections a bit (if you saw your reflections, it would be a bit green or blue), but the reflections are significantly reduced.

Technically, no consumer display has more than 3 colors, with 255 shades of each. If shades are considered "colors", then 8-bit displays still only have the ability to display 255*3+1 colors, 766 colors. The +1 color is black.

Yes, 8-bit displays are actually 766 color displays by the reasoning of this lawsuit. All the rest of the colors are only achieved by perceptual trickery. Adjacent display elements, when small enough in size, are perceived as one. Temporal dithering is another trick to achieve "millions of colors".

I agree that apple's marketing was a bit misleading. But it is important to also realize that no lcd display is actually doing "millions of colors". The millions of colors thing has always relied on the trickery of the human brain. Apple's marketing material stuck to this philosophy but also applied it to newer display technologies. Hence the confusion.

Apparently some people feel that temporal dithering shouldn't figure into the advertised color-count, despite the fact that spatial dithering has always been. The only solution I see is to no longer advertise soley the number of colors. This spec should be accompanied by the bit-count per display element, and the types of dithering used.

I'm for the more specific advertising. But I'm also unsure if it would result in more or less consumer confusion. Though at least us geeks would have the info we need to make informed purchases.

Edit:
(If you want to really cook your own noodle, try to wrap your head around this. How does one properly describe the color-count for DLP devices with color wheels? They have no sub-pixels. Does that mean they actually have "millions of colors" while LCD displays don't? But yet, all DLP devices rely on temporal dithering. They trade spatial dithering for temporal dithering.

The color-count thing is anything but clearly defined.)

That would only be possible if each pixel had its own backlight. As it stands, currently LCDs have one single backlight that stays lit all the time, "black" is achieved by "turning down" each sub-pixel to the minimum level.

Liquid crystals work by "twisting" light from one orthogonal polarisation to another - unpolarised light from the backlight is horizontally polarised, passed through the liquid crystal, and then passed through a vertical polariser. The liquid crystals "twist" the light from horizontal polarisation; the more it twists, the larger the vertical component of the light becomes and therefore the higher the intensity of light emitted from the vertical polariser (front of the screen) becomes.

Ideally, at level "0", the liquid crystal should be fully "untwisted", so the light stays horizontally polarised and is blocked by the vertical polariser (resulting in black). Unfortunately the liquid crystal cannot completely untwist, light therefore is still emitted and there is no true "black".

The iMac 24" is an H-IPS panel. It's a little cheaper than the S-IPS, but sound quality.

what exactly are we saying , i really want an imac. Is the screen not good at all ? ... i've been watching youtube reviews and everyones is like " the screen is amazing" . So i guess i wont know how good/bad it is until i see one is person.

While we're on the topic... The lack of true black isn't limited to just LCD displays. No human will ever see true black. So what's the point again?

Oh yeah, If assuming sub-pixel values of zero aren't true black, then I suppose 8-bit 3-element lcd displays are actually capable of 768 colors. Come to think of it, I agree with your correction. (Scratch my previous assertion of 255*3+1 colors)

Color perception is far from predictable for individual people. Some people actually prefer the 6-bit displays because of the quicker pixel response time. I suppose it depends on whether you're more perceptive of spatial or temporal dithering.

Indeed. In other words, Cartman, make your way to an Apple store near you and check out the screen with a variety of still and moving images. No one apart from you knows how you perceive the screen. If you think it looks good/acceptable-for-the-money/the-best-thing-you've-ever-seen/whatever, that's all that matters.

The screens are very nice. It's that 1% Pre-press/National Geographic/Playboy Magazine photographer wanting to save $700 - $1500 and not buy the cinema display that are bitching the 20in miraculously doesn't have the same color quality as the Cinema Displays of equivalent screen size.

Ya well , i live in nova scotia canada. theirs no apple stores here :P .. i'm planning on getting an imac from the apple website. the screen seems to be fine for me. i like to edit photos for fun , but nothing professional. Also, what is with everyone sewing apple over the stupidest things. ?