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Sharp announces five-colour display
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 2nd June 2009
The Sharp display - which is still in its prototype stage - uses five primary colours to render a more true-to-life palette.
According to an article over at The Register, Sharp has put the finishing touches to a new LCD panel which is capable of displaying a colour palette mixed from five primary colours – a significant upgrade from the more usual three.
The prototype – which measures a not-inconsiderable 60.5” diagonal and has a native resolution of 1920x1080 – adds cyan and yellow colour elements to the standard mixture of red, green, and blue. These additional colours allow the colour gamut to be extended to cover 99 percent of the Pointer colour space – meaning more accurate representation of real-world colours.
The effect is so striking that Sharp claims the images displayed on the screen are to all intents and purposes “identical in appearance to real-world objects” - aside from being two-dimensional, of course.
The extended colour gamut doesn't just make the pictures look more true to life, either: Sharp claims that the increased colour space offered by the new technology means that the back light can be dialled down a notch compared to more limited displays. A lower back light level means truer blacks – and a smaller energy consumption for the display, helping the environment as well as your tired eyes.
The technology, which is due to be demonstrated in prototype form at the Society for Information Display Conference next week, is sadly still at the prototype stage – but the company has declared its intention to continue development and release a commercial version as soon as possible.
Does the thought of a more realistic colour space fill you with joy, or are there larger problems with LCD display technologies that need fixing before the Sharp tech will come in to its own? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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This is a great step and begs the question, if we are doing it with printers why didnt we do it with LCD but I guess the cost was probably a main factor and they wanted tp bleed us of our money first so that they can then bleed us again but still looking forward to this product but Im certainly NOT looking forward to the price tag it will hold.
I was just going to say!
My first thought was "I hope they release some videos soon".
I think the point is that there are now five subpixels for every pixel instead of the usual three.
There aren't five primary colours (by definition - we almost always have tristimulus eyes). Cyan and yellow are secondary colours.
But nitpicking aside, we are all aware, right, that this means specific support in any driving technology? You can't have "images indistinguishable from reality" on your pentastimulus display if you don't also have camera or CG rendering gear to match. This can be put in the same category as almost all of the stuff you see on TV feature lists in a haze of misapplied superlatives and fabricated nonwords: "Ultra Quad-X Inendo Hyper Crystal Technology Processor".
The reduction of required backlight power is also an interesting claim. Assuming all five subpixels are the same area, basic description of the problem follows:
Ordinarily to render yellow you would need to turn on the red and green subpixels, both of which throw away 66% of the backlight, thus allowing through about 22% of the backlight energy that made it through the polariser for that macropixel (33% of two subpixels, each of which is 33% of the area of the macropixel). Instead, you're turning on the yellow pixel, which only throws away 33%, being a secondary colour. But the yellow subpixel is only 20% of the area of the macropixel, so you're only actually transmitting 12% of the energy. The upshot of this is that you actually need a backlight very nearly twice as powerful for the same perceived brightness of a primary colour.
I love slightly-rewritten press releases!
P
we don't have tristimulus eyes; our cones respond to quite wide bands of frequencies. hell they don't even peak at RGB - they peak at yellowish, greenish and purpleish.
as for needing separate rendering gear to match the five primary colours in this display, that's not necessarily true either. no monitor can match sRGB space as it stands, and i doubt this one will either, so all you really need is a function mapping sRGB space to the 5 primaries. i assume the cyan and yellow primary frequencies will be chosen to bisect the B-G and G-R lines in the sRGB gamut.
i was talking to someone at uni who is doing research into high dynamic range displays and wide colour spaces, and he mentioned a few papers that discussed using additional primaries to narrow the colour gamut, not widen it, due to the shift from fluorescent to LED backlighting which have a completely different spectrum. didn't really go into it in depth, i didn't have much time and i'm a virtual environments guy not an imaging guy, so some of it went a lil over my head.
Yes, but that's still three stimuli. The passbands of the filters in a TFT overlap, too, to a certain degree. Of course all this is pointless until we get a display gamut that exceeds the human visual range, which I suspect this new display still doesn't do. All it's doing, at best, is turning the CIE representation from a triangle into a pentagon, and in doing so, making it not-an-sRGB-device. What's the point? Unless:
I wondered about that, but - what would that get you? If they were to be true secondaries in terms of the RGB primaries the monitor already had, that's exactly what they'd do, but where would that get you, other than slightly better chroma resolution (which isn't the problem in the first place). Again; what is point?
That's not really what I meant - the point is that to reproduce images "indistinguishable from reality" you need not only a display capable of displaying it, you obviously need a camera capable of shooting it. Current HD cameras are, in an ideal world. rec. 709, which is a great example because it has exactly the same primaries as sRGB. So, the best thing you can do is make this monitor map its display capability to sRGB. Which is what everything else does. So: what is point?
The main problem in both sRGB and rec.709 (and 609, which is only different in the detail) is not any of this, it's green, because TV green is based on what they could make green phosphors do in the CRT days. This is a horrible, feeble lime green (which is what, for instance, the CSS spec calls full sRGB green) and is the main vector for improvement in my mind. The real issue I think is that any improvement in this means creating monitors with a better green, an enhanced RGB colourspace (eRGB?) which will inevitably result in a transition period where people have to know to tell their displays what to expect, or it'll be displayed wrongly. There is already some professional gear out there which has some enhanced colourspace capabilities (the Panavision Genesis and Sony F35 cameras, which use the same imaging sensor) but in a domestic context we have people who can't even set aspect ratios up correctly, so god help the person who adds something else to the mix.
P
And this better be well, better than their Aquos line, which had a really over-lit backlight.
Well in comparison to a Pioneer Kuro of course, which isn't fair at all.