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Well, that's a relief.

Did they settle for pennies on the color?

Next up, illegal use of a manilla envelope.

Mar 26, 08 - 12:32 pm Comment from: Spark

They had me at 64,000.

Am I on crack?? I thought it was only the MacBook that fell into this category not the MacBook Pros..

Any sobering comments?

Top 10 reasons to sue Apple for "Millions of Colors" claim:

#10 - Judge can only count up to 999,999.

#9 - Photographers are a protected species in California.

#8 They are stupid but greedy = the "Me" generation.

#7 I'm sexy

Mar 26, 08 - 12:53 pm Comment from: Macromancer

#5 Lawyer needs a new BMW

Mar 26, 08 - 12:54 pm Comment from: HMCIV

Ironically, one of the photographers shoots all his shots in B&W;because it "offers a more artistic value".

Mar 26, 08 - 12:54 pm Comment from: It's About Time

# 6 Because I have nothing else to do.

Mar 26, 08 - 12:55 pm Comment from: It's About Time

# 4 My funny looking neighbor Steve Ballmer thought it would be a good thing to do.

I purchased my Amiga 500 because it displayed 4096 colors when other computers had green and black. However, I later found that that was only in HAM mode, which was a limited use screen mode. Can I sue Commodore, Escom, Gateway, Amiga Inc and Hyperian?

Why only sue Apple? Any monitor with 24-bit is capable of displaying millions of colors, but not all at once. Besides, the human eye could not detect them all anyway. These photographers must not be able to make money on photography.

#3 It was settled out of court. Steve Jobs met these guys and gave them his number 4 stare and they ran away.

Mar 26, 08 - 01:00 pm Comment from: Ampar

# 3 There is no step three.

Mar 26, 08 - 01:01 pm Comment from: flappo

steve jobs is grate

#2 Their last lawsuit, "Firewire -- there's a wire but no fire" didn't go too well.

And the number one reason to sue Apple over Millions of Colors:

Stickers, lots of stickers!

@ Ampar. Step "three"? Apple is becoming more ecological?

#1 Your an American and you love to abuse your FUBAR legal system.

Mar 26, 08 - 01:08 pm Comment from: eMax

#0 - They originally bought a vista powered Dell

Mar 26, 08 - 01:08 pm Comment from: MacLovin

can cameras even capture "millions" of colors? why do they give a crap? seriously people, grow up!

Mar 26, 08 - 01:10 pm Comment from: Big Al

Each pixel on a screen can only show 3 colors. Red, blue and green. The rest is magic. The percentage of each of those 3 colors determines the pixel color seen by the eye. Further magic occurs when the pixel density is low and the color of the adjacent pixels come into play and fools your eye even more.

Nevertheless the LCD screen is only physically capable of showing red, blue and green. The millions of colors on a low pixel density screen as well as a high pixel density screen is produced by tricks played upon your eyes.

There really was no case. I bet if Apple paid anything, they helped pay the Photographer's Lawyers' expenses.

Big Al, I totally agree with that. They should've just went with the original marketing plan -- "now displaying bazillion thousand trillion colors"

Mar 26, 08 - 01:22 pm Comment from: silverhawk

Number 1 reason to settle: They were in East Texas-the speed trap of patent lawyers.

"#3 It was settled out of court. Steve Jobs met these guys and gave them his number 4 stare and they ran away."
I heard that Jobs gave them "Blue Steel".

Mar 26, 08 - 01:24 pm Comment from: Ampar

To Gilles:

This will explain step three:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHzM4avGrKI

Ooops, sorry, Gilles! That was me who posted under your name.
It was a mistake.
I apologise.
Please don't sue me!

Mar 26, 08 - 01:28 pm Comment from: DLMeyer

#1) Big Al is mostly right. Each pixel is made up of three colors, but at different levels. If the blue color is high while the red and green(?) are low, the pixel looks blue. If all are high it looks black. If all are at ~15%, you have "Kodak grey".
#2) many screens cannot display "millions of colors" at one time, if only because they don't have the bare minimum 2 million pixels for the job.
#3) the human eye cannot detect the subtle differences between adjacent tones in a 24-bit scheme - most cannot discriminate beyond about the 18-bit level. Asking more is ego-boo ... your eyes just are NOT that good!
#4) dithering may be a 'trick', but it works just fine for viewing purposes - rather than for printing. The display technology for viewing on-screen does not change the file itself.

@ Missy Pants

I'm not an American citizen, thus I understand that people make mistakes, and I won't sue you.

__** NEW APPLE CINEMA DISPLAYS **__

Red, Blue And Green Never Looked So Good.

LOL

@ Ampar

Very nostalgic video, thanks. In fact, there is a step tree : convincing my ISP (Bell Canada) that my iMac is a real computer. I could write vollumes about the misunderstandings with my "personal technical advisor"... First, he didn't know there was other operating systems besides Windows.

This is a valid case, as any working professional who deals with computer color spaces would know. The ignorance on "display" in the comments here are truly funny.

As a (sadly) FEW people said, this is a legitimate case of false advertising. If someone told you that your car had an 8 cylinder engine but it was actually a 6 cylinder that "faked" being as powerful as 8, but wasn't truly, would you dismiss it so quickly?

Let's say Apple gave you a written promise to pay you "millions" for your house, but on closing day, wrote out the check for "thousands." Would that be alright? Would you say, "thousands, millions, whatever... at least I got something.

As a basic refresher:

8 bit = 256 colors
16 bit = thousands
24 bit = millions

6 bit per color = 18 bit color

There are 8-bit LCD panels out there, they are simply much more expensive. The vast majority of consumer LCDs (and, as far as I know, all the LCDs used in laptops) are cheaper, lower-quality 6-bit panels that can only display 18 bits of color. If you’ve ever wondered why some seemingly gullible people spent three times as much as you did for a similarly sized LCD (like a Cinema Display which can display a true "millions of colors"), it’s probably because they’re actually getting full 24-bit color.

There is a clear technical difference spec-wise between dithered millions of colors and true millions of colors, Apple knows this and shouldn't be lying to sell their laptops.

Apple claimed that the MBP could display millions of colors when it couldn't. That's not ok.

Mar 26, 08 - 01:53 pm Comment from: Ampar

To Gilles:
"convincing my ISP (Bell Canada) that my iMac is a real computer"

Yikes. Sorry to hear that. Here's to hoping that one day that will never happen again. The iPod and now the iPhone will go a long way towards opening eyes and spreading the word.

Mar 26, 08 - 02:05 pm Comment from: Buster

Reason #-1 reason to sue Apple ...

Bluetooth already exists...in Northern Quebec where we grow most of the blueberries in the east.

Mar 26, 08 - 02:07 pm Comment from: Buster

And like Gilles said, being Canadian I won't really sue Apple, but I will ask them politely to change it to Greentooth or some such...

Mar 26, 08 - 02:07 pm Comment from: Big Al

But NewsReader, there are only red, green and blue diodes in the screen. That's all the colours the LCD screen is working with.

The percentage of power sent to those 3 diodes in each pixel gives the illusion of some different colour. The colour of 4 of the adjacent pixels can further alter this illusion.

Every colour in every LCD screen except for pure red, green or blue is just an illusion brought about by LCD screen magic regardless of the pixel density.

Apple did not falsely advertise the pixel density. The illusion of millions of colours is still there regardless of pixel density. There is still no case.

Mar 26, 08 - 02:24 pm Comment from: Madmax

Windoze has been offering a millions of colors setting on the display panel since forever. Did these two bozo's ever question M$ about such a statement. No. Only in the US are muppets given the opportunity to sue on such trivia.

Mar 26, 08 - 02:25 pm Comment from: Sixvodkas

Big Al is correct-a-mundo.
LCD panels have a 3 sub-pixels (1 red, 1 blue, 1 green), which form 1 pixel unit.

Your eye doesn't see closely spaced colors individually. Instead, you perceive closely spaced colors as a single, blended color. You don't distinguish sub-pixels of color; you see sub-pixels as pixels of an intermediate color the sub-pixels form in combination.

The exact color you perceive depends on the amount of each of the primary colors that is represented in the pixel of perceived color. The perceptual process by which combinations of primary colors form an intermediate color is called "additive mixing."

@Big Al:

Your argument is specious: all color systems work by generating levels primary colors and mixing them appropriately. The "total number of colors" that such a pixel can generate is determined by the number of levels each of the individual components can achieve. For LCD displays, the levels are achieved by altering the physical opacity of the component subpixel inversely to the graphic card's intensity for that channel for that pixel. (I'm simplifying -- the mapping is much more complex which is why LCD calibrators and CMS like ColorSync exist.)

For instance, if you set the opacity of the red subpixel to 50% and the opacity of the blue and green subpixels to 0% then you get a pale cyan.

The graphics card within the MacBook Pro allows 256 levels of intensity, but the screen is only capable of achieving 64 levels of opacity. In essence, every four levels of intensity get mapped to the same level of opacity, so information is lost there.

As far as I can gather, Apple does some tricks temporally so that the illusion is maintained. Suppose we are looking at a pixel that is (1/256,0/256,0/256); that is, one level above black in the red channel. A naïve LCD would map that to pure black: (64/64, 64/64, 64/64). Apple cheats by using (64/64, 64/64, 64/64) for three refresh cycles and (63/64, 64/64, 64/64) for the fourth; mathematically, that would be the equivalent of a constant opacity of (255/256, 256/256, 256/256). The problem is that human vision is far from purely mathematical and we tend to notice flicker effects especially at low levels. Add to that the memory effects of LCD shutters (which vary with thermal environment) and the mess gets worse.

If these photographers were using their MBPs to do color correction in the field, I could understand why they would be upset. Screen calibration is a pain, and having to re-calibrate every X minutes because the temperature changed would be a deal-killer.

Gah, noticed immediately after submitting that my math was off. Subtract 1 from the numerator and denominator of all the fractions:

64 levels of opacity => 0/63 to 63/63.

256 levels of intensity => 0/255 to 255/255.

It's too early in the day for math.

It might also be worth noting that when you go to print, all your colors (subpixel, dithered, or otherwise ... which are simply representations of purer, virtual colors) get converted into other half-toned or stochastic screened images, which are another type of dithering. So no one gets to see the "real" colors ... everyone (designer, end viewer) seems only dithered representations. Obviously the situations is different if you are going to other media, like TV, computer, mobile phone, etc.

How the hell can you show damages for such a technical subtlety?
The millions of colors are still in the disk data. How did they manage to print without using the data in the photo file?

Just my $0.02

I'm gonna sue apple, my monitor only has 3 colors! All the others are an illusion. Shit, you'd think a 'professional' photographer would have checked the bit depth before purchasing. Or looked at the screen? They have 10 days to return it anyway.

Mar 26, 08 - 05:20 pm Comment from: Ampar

If you're a longtime Apple fan, you'll remember that ten years ago there were only six colors that mattered.

http://db.tidbits.com/article/4894

Mar 26, 08 - 05:23 pm Comment from: neomonkey

This lawsuit is a shakedown. Real pros don't do image editing on their laptop monitors. The computers do output 8 bit color, to monitors that can display 8 bit color.

"First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

Any sobering comments?

Apple used dithering 25-30 years ago on the Apple II line.

Can I sue for that too? After all, not getting 16 true colors on that 8-bit hardware endangered the world. Or something.

Maybe I'll sue for decades of emotional anguish as well.

It's just so easy to blame lawyers for ... enforcing the law. Get off your "hate lawyers" rants and stop blaming them for simply knowing the law. If you want the law changed, there is a process for that -- it's called the legislative process. Change the law democratically for the benefit of all, rather than venting your spleen at us.

With that in mind, let me share a lawyer's joke about clients (so true, so true):

"A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man below says, "Yes. You are in a hot air balloon, hovering
approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees N. latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees W. longitude."

"You must be a lawyer," says the balloonist.

"I am" replies the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost."

The man below responds, "You must be a client."

"I am" replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are, or where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault."