News Sharp announces five-colour display

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2009/06/02/sharp-announces-five-colour-display/1

Sharp has created a prototype full-HD 60.5" display which uses five primary colours to render its palette - allowing for 99 percent of the Pointer colour space to be reproduced.

 

Too bad the only way to see for yourself is to actually go out and see for yourself.

 

Awesome, but they will need to combine this with locally dimming LED backlighting if they want their claim of "identical in appearance to real-world object" to be taken seriously

 

lol ya, I am reminded of Futurama, when Fry is on the couch and they are like Fry why not go out side and check out nature and hes like go out side when I can watch nature on TV in Ultra HiDef, Its better then reality lol.

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.

 

this isnt exactly new, ive got monitors that have cyan and magenta inputs

 

Five primary colours? Have Sharp been breaking science?

 

Er... it is new. I don't know what monitors you are talking about, but to my knowledge no manufacturer has previously ever sold a monitor that uses five distinct colours in its display technology to mix colours. THAT is what this tech does that is new, nothing to do with cyan / magenta inputs.

 

I was just going to say!

My first thought was "I hope they release some videos soon".

 

I've seen that FujiFilm's been selling a digital SLR camera that sees in near-UV and near-IR in addition to visible wavelengths. Maybe they should design a CCD camera that can capture full-frame-rate video in 5 color chanels: IR, R, G, B, and UV, and allow those to be output to this display's 5 primary colors to map the IR to red, red to yellow, green to green (natch), blue to cyan, and UV to blue. I, for one, think that would be a potentially useful tool for scientists, ESPECIALLY astronomers, considering the Hubble Space Telescope's new camera is designed to see in a near-IR to near-UV spectrum. What do you guys think?

 

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

 

Insightful.

 

I love how I always learn something new, and/or get the urge to do further research on something when I peruse your site!

 

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

 

Ahhh, the green you just spoke about makes it make sense now. So you have the same issues with the additive colour model (RGB) as printers have with the subtractive model (CMY). Poor generation of the correct frequencies to make up the gamut.

 

I wonder if this'll make it to the professional market.

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.