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Apple not the only PC vendor making bogus display claims

A class action lawsuit filed recently against Apple Inc. claims that, among other things, the company advertised MacBooks and MBPs as capable of displaying “millions of colors” when in fact they can only do that by “dithering.
Written by Jason D. O'Grady, Contributor

A class action lawsuit filed recently against Apple Inc. claims that, among other things, the company advertised MacBooks and MBPs as capable of displaying “millions of colors” when in fact they can only do that by “dithering.”

Wired's Gadget Lab blog mentions that Apple is not the only one making this claim:

The majority of LCD panels show color at only 6 bits of depth per RGB element, for a total of only about 260,000 colors. However, finely-detailed dithering at the sub-pixel level tricks our eyes into perceiving millions, as would be seen in a true-color 8-bit display.

What's funny is that the lawsuit claims that banding/sparkling issues aren't evident when booted into Windows which means that either, a) Microsoft's subpixel dithering techniques are better than Apple's or that, b) Apple's software is somehow degrading the MacBook's display performance.

A poll in yesterday's post indicates that more than 75 percent of readers find the MacBook displays to be acceptable but I have a feeling that we haven't heard the end of this one yet.

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