The Need for 10-bit Displays
Conventional display devices use 8-bits per color channel (or 24-bits per
pixel) to display images and video. Although this amounts to more than 16
million colors, it still corresponds to a fraction of the colors we perceive
in the real-world. This is illustrated in Figure 1, where the green
triangle shows the boundaries of the sRGB color space on the CIE-xy
chromaticity diagram.
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Conventional sRGB compliant 8-bits monitors can only represent the colors
that lie in this triangle, while the human eye is capable of perceiving all
the colors in the entire chromaticity diagram. This discrepancy is further
emphasized by the fact that today’s most professional cameras and printers
have a color gamut larger than that of sRGB (such as Adobe RGB shown by the
red triangle in Figure 1), creating a bottleneck on the display side.
HP also brings up what they call "banding", an effect that can be seen when
very similar colors are displayed close together and become too
distinguishable from each other.
The Benefits of 30-bit
It might seem that a 24-bit panel, which offers 16.7 million colors, would
be sufficient. For most purposes, that’s true. However, there are cases
where 8-bits per sub-pixel is not enough.
Consider a grayscale image. Gray (including white and black) is produced
when the three sub-pixels (red, green, and blue) are equally bright. This
means that the values for the three sub-pixels are the same: 35/35/35, for
example. With 8-bits per sub-pixel, gray can go from 0/0/0 (black) to 255/
255/255 (white). Therefore, there are only 256 levels of gray possible.
This can lead to "banding", which is an effect that arises because the step
between adjacent levels of gray is big enough for the eye to detect. It can
be a problem in certain kinds of visualization, such as 3D Understanding the
HP DreamColor LP2480zx’s 30-bit Panel 2 Gray banding (left, exaggerated)
is eliminated by the 30-bit panel (right) rendering for automotive styling.
With a 30-bit panel, there are 1024 levels of gray, and it’s almost
impossible for the eye to detect the step between adjacent levels.