HP and DreamWorks announced that they have been “working together” on a 30-bit color display that will be built for 25% of the cost of equivalent displays in this space. I used the quotes up there because it looks to me like the DreamWorks name is there for marketing purposes – that’s just my assumption.
Most LCD displays on the market can display up to 16.7 million colors. That number comes from the combination of 256-levels of red, green and blue (16.7M = 256x256x256 = 24-bit). While most of us tolerate the occasional color bending on dark gradients, “workstation” displays have to be better than that, and some can display one billion colors (30-bit = 10-bit of red, green, blue). Two more bits doesn’t seem like a lot, but now we would have 1024-levels of R,G,B – this makes color gradients much, much better.
Don’t dream about having one of these just yet. For one, consumer graphics cards can’t display 30-bit color (10-10-10, not to be confused with 32bits 8-8-8-8, which is 24bits of visible colors and 8 bits of alpha-channel). Secondly, consumer operating systems aren’t too friendly with 30-bit color either. No pricing yet.