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HP announces billion colour monitor
FLOGGER OF EXPENSIVE PRINTER INK HP is selling the newest entrant to its performance series of LCD monitors, the ZR30w, which it says displays over one billion colours.
We ran out of ideas once we got to cyan, but apparently HP has managed to come up with more colours in its screen than that bloke Joseph in the Bible had on his jacket. As well as its 30-bits per pixel that's capable of displaying 1.07 billion colours it also has 4.1 million pixels and Displayport connectivity.
The monitor has a 30-inch diagonal screen, 2560 x 1600 resolution, and a 3000:1 dynamic contrast ratio in a 16:10 aspect ratio, and it might give you an edge when playing Quake, but we doubt it. Alternatively you could use it for work or something.
Bigger rarely means better when it comes to the environment, but HP said that the ZR30w display panel has an 85 percent efficient power supply and was more energy efficient than previous 30-inch models. Meanwhile the chassis is made up of at least 25 per cent recycled resin.
In case not enough people in the office can see your glorious screen, the ZR30w comes with a 6-way adjustable stand, meaning that you can swivel it around to your heart's content.
Currently we only have the US price, $1,299.00, which even HP says is an estimate. µ
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@Mike B: All recent cards from both ATI and nvidia claim 10bit support actually, but the software is indeed another matter.
Not to mention that the picture formats that support more than 24 bit are not too often seen, and if seen seldomly have more than 24bit content, but camera manufacturers have announced they wanted to go higher bit depth, graphics cards makers obviously like the idea too, so to have monitors move in that direction would be nice.
It needs an device and industry wide adoption and it's nice if everybody takes their individual steps.
Next on the list: IPv6 ;P
Agree with Mike B.'s comment.. but also.. Seems very few apps support 10bpc.. I know there have been hacks to get it working in say PS CS4, but if you check on Adobe forums they are officially "still working" on 10bpc support for cs5..
Market is still surprisingly immature when it comes to 10bpc..
I think you are over thinking this a bit.
More or less we are used to 4:3 and 16:9 so it's easier for us to see 16:10 as a taller version of 16:9. Otherwise people will be scratching their head with 8:5.
Funny! I thought about it for a while, and while what you say is mathematically correct, it's easier to understand 16 by 10 than 8 by 5, simply because you can instantly know that in one dimension the screen is 60% bigger than in the other (unless you're highly proficient in math, which is not the case for most people out there...). Another reason is that we're used to understanding things in multiples of 10.
What's with 16 by 10? Is 8 by 5 not sexy enough?
HP makes a few other S-IPS panel monitors, the ZR24W, and the ZR22W model. They're actually quite reasonably priced for IPS panel monitors. I've been quite interested in them as I'm tired of the performance that I get from TN panels.
I thought the majority of the IPS panels used 10 bits internally, but would only accept an 8 bit signal from the video card. I'm no expert on displayport or anything, but from the looks of it the standard seems to support 6-16 bit color. So it is entirely possible HP is running this at 10 bit. Although, at the MSRP of somewhere around $1200+ you'll certainly pay for it, compared to the 24" at $425.
Would it be too much to ask that an article (supposedly) written by an IT journalist would mention that a) it's a 10-bit-per-channel S-IPS monitor, b) it requires a graphics card with support for 10-bpc output and c) there have been such monitors and graphics cards for some time (but at a higher price point)...?