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agrigoriev

14 Posts

23205

September 18th, 2008 12:00

30-bit color quality support for 2709W

As a new owner of Ultrasharp 2709W with support of 1 billion colors quality (30-bit) I’d like to know how to activate this support. My ATI Radeon GPU has two dual-link DVI outputs each supports up to 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions. I’ve checked latest Catalyst driver for XP (SP3) and did not find a settings more 24 bit.

Am I missing something?

amcl

21 Posts

September 18th, 2008 20:00

Strange. My NVIDIA 8800GT setting is either 16 or 32 bit for color.

RChris

370 Posts

September 18th, 2008 20:00

What is the model of your video card?

gpro

2K Posts

September 19th, 2008 07:00

amcl,

Back in the old days ;) Windows processed data in 32 bit chunks, so 32 bits were needed to handle 24 bit color. The remaining bits were unused. So when it says in Display Properties "True Color (32 bit)" it actually means 24 bit color depth.

agrigoriev

14 Posts

September 19th, 2008 11:00

I have 3650, but it does not matter because all ATI/AMD GPUs starting back to 1*** family have 1 billion colors support. So on a hardware level both devises (GPU and monitor) support 30-bit or 10 bit per channel. I had Nvidia card and know that Nvidia's 32-bit is actually just 24-bit, so I switched to ATI deliberately to get true 30-bit color quality and now looking how to activate this support on software (CCC) level.    

gpro

2K Posts

September 20th, 2008 02:00

As far as I can tell Windows XP does not support more than 24 bit color, but the new Color System in Vista supports up to 48 bit color.
 
The 2709W uses a Samsung  LTM270CS01 panel (http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/panelsearch.htm). It is an 8 bit display using Frame Rate Control (FRC)  to achieve 1.07b colors.
  
 
* Full 30-bit display processing
 
* Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs. Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)
 
* Two integrated DisplayPort™ outputs. Each supports 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x1600
 
Like most published specs these appear incomplete or ambiguous.
 
DVI specification states: Color depths requiring greater than 24-bit per pixel are allowed to be supported via the second link... The system must identify the capability exists in the monitor before the high color depth is enabled.
 
This implies that single link DVI only supports up to 24 bit. The 2709W only has single link DVI.
 
Higher bandwidth is possible with DisplayPort or HDMI v1.3.
 
Bottom line seems to be that high depth color has to be supported by every link in the display chain

agrigoriev

14 Posts

September 20th, 2008 20:00

GPRO

Many thanks for this reply. 

The latest DVI spec does support 30-bit color via the single link with resolution up to 1200p60 (pls see Redeon GPU spec). At the moment I don’t have any equipment with DP, but I've tried HDMI port of 2709W as well and could not get 30-bit color anyway.

So the question reminds - how can we get an advantage of 30-bit color support of this 2709 monitor. This was the sale point for me to buy such a expensive monitor and I don’t want to be disappointed.

Message Edited by agrigoriev on 09-21-2008 06:43 AM
Message Edited by agrigoriev on 09-21-2008 06:44 AM

gpro

2K Posts

September 21st, 2008 11:00

AFAIK the DVI spec I quoted is the only one available, and it appears to contradict the ATI Radeon spec. I'd like to see some further information supporting ATI's claim of 30-bit over single link DVI, particularly at 1920x1200, as I don't believe there's sufficient bandwidth.

 

However I think you'll find that Windows XP does not support more than 24 bit color anyway.

agrigoriev

14 Posts

September 22nd, 2008 00:00

Thank you GPRO,

Xmm, so you think that WinXP has intrinsic limitation for deep color support.

I may migrate to Vista, but first I would like someone to confirm this.

Would anyone with Vista OS, Radeon GPU and Dell 2709 verify 30-bit color support please. 

On a side note: i am surprised that Dell representative does not show up and addresses this issue.   

gpro

2K Posts

September 23rd, 2008 11:00

There's a bit of information here:

Windows Color System in Microsoft Windows Vista

"This includes support for instances of extended dynamic range and gamut color space families such as IEC 61966-2-2 (scRGB)."

 

"scRGB offers a larger color gamut and 64-bit encoding with 16-bits per channel -- enough to specify over 65,000 steps for each color instead of the 256 steps available with sRGB's 8-bits."

- Defining scRGB

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