[Openicc] Questions about color pickers and graphics libraries under LINUX

[Chris Murphy]

On Feb 11, 2008, at 1:28 AM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> This seems more like a problem for the users than it is for the OS.  
> While I agree with most things in your email, what response are you  
> expecting from it?

Umm well if users are having a problem that an OS could solve, seems  
like it's something the OS should solve rather than being a bump on a  
log. Why do we have operating systems anyway?

> It seems that displays are all over the map and since most displays  
> are not calibrated, users just have to get used to it.

If they were calibrated, it would *STILL* be a problem. A calibrated  
wide gamut display is still a wide gamut display, and has no  
correlation to sRGB.

> The banding and posterization you see on these problematic displays  
> sounds like a lack of sufficient levels in the LCD drivers, which  
> can't really be corrected outside of the display.  I have read that  
> current laptop LCD displays have only about 6 bits of actual level  
> information.  To me this is just plain broken.

If we weren't trying to force them to behave so radically unlike  
their native behavior, this wouldn't be a problem. But we have to  
force them to do so at a hardware level because operating systems  
fail to manage color between devices. So, a circular problem.

In effect we have some cheap LCDs that don't do a very good job of  
simulating CRTs, and we have cheap operating systems that don't do a  
very good job of managing color at all let alone correctly.

> Just as we have seen with TVs, vendors will tweak their displays to  
> be as vibrant as possible in the store as possible, at the expense  
> of accuracy.  Vibrant sells while dull and accurate does not.

There are mechanisms by which they can communicate the primaries of  
the display through DDCI. The operating system should be capable of  
using this information to build a display profile on the fly and  
using it for system wide display compensation.

The operating system is LIMITING my choice of display technology  
because it's being brain dead about the reality and *necessity* of  
divergent display technologies.


Chris Murphy
Color Remedies (TM)
New York, NY
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Co-author "Real World Color Management, 2nd Ed"