Tag Archives: iPad

Color of the year for 2013 falls outside sRGB gamut

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Pantone Emerald 17-5641

Pantone recently announced their color of the year for 2013, a deep shade of emerald green that they call “Emerald 17-5641.” It’s a great color but there’s a catch- most displays cannot accurately show it.

Based on data from Pantone’s website, I was able to plot the color in CIE 1931 (xy). As you can see in the chart below, Pantone’s color is well outside the sRGB/rec.709 color gamut standard used by most HDTVs, the new iPad/iPhone and many desktop monitors. These devices will be stuck showing a version of Pantone’s emerald green that’s less saturated and probably a bit more yellow than the real thing.

Pantone Emerald 17-5641 vs sRGB, Adobe RGB 1998 and DCI-P3 color gamuts in CIE 1931

This is a perfect example of a popular real-world color that falls outside of the sRGB/rec.709 gamut. Unless you have a monitor that’s able to show wider color gamuts, like the DCI-P3 or Adobe RGB standards, you are missing out on a great color.

Shopping for a tablet this holiday season? Don’t forget to look at color performance

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If you have been researching the perfect tablet to give to a loved one this holiday season, you’ve probably read a lot about display quality. Tablet display size, resolution and aspect ratio have been discussed at length this year, which is really no surprise, since the quality of the display has the biggest impact on how we enjoy content on these devices.

What is surprising though is that color performance, one of the biggest differentiators among the current crop of tablet displays, has been largely glossed over by the mainstream gadget press.

The Verge’s tablet comparison tool, for example, gives great info about pixel density, aspect ratio and touch capabilities, but color performance is nowhere to be found:

Color is being ignored in spite of the fact that there are tremendous differences in the color performance of each of these devices that directly impact the consumer experience on each.

So why are we overlooking a feature that, unlike many of the features we focus on these days, presents a real difference between devices?  I see a couple reasons. First and foremost, thanks to Apple’s marketing of the Retina display, pixels-per-inch has become the spec du jour in today’s device wars.  Device makers are focusing their marketing efforts on pixel count above anything else.

Aside from current trends, I believe there’s also a macro reason to why color has been left out: color performance is just hard to compare. There is no universally accepted spec that can sum up color performance across devices.

Take the three popular tablets above. We could add a “color gamut” row to the chart, measuring against sRGB, which would look like this:

From this information, a shopper could gather that the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD have about the same color performance and both outdo the iPad mini. That is an accurate assessment, but it’s not the whole story. If we look at those color gamuts plotted in CIE 1976, some important nuances become apparent.

By measuring the percent of sRGB, we know how much of that overall color standard the device can reproduce.  However, displays usually produce more of one color than another and that information is completely lost with this measurement.  The Nexus and Kindle have significantly deeper blue than the iPad mini, most likely due to a narrower blue color filter like the one found in the third and fourth generation iPad. This accounts for most of the difference in sRGB coverage between the iPad mini and the other two devices.

Take a look at the other two primaries and it gets more interesting. In the image on the right that zooms in on green, we see that the Kindle Fire has the deepest green of the three, followed by the iPad mini and the Nexus.

For reds, though, it’s different again, with the Nexus having the deepest reds followed by Kindle and then iPad.

If we ever want to make color performance a real differentiator in consumer choice, we need to develop a new universal standard to easily compare color across devices, taking into account all of these nuances.

Color is a complex story to tell, but small differences in color performance are just as noticeable to consumers as pixel density in everyday use. Next time you find yourself at a retailer who carries all three devices, try googling test patterns and look at the differences. You might be surprised.

Is creativity the next killer mobile app?

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Since the debut of the iPad in 2010, tablets have become the ultimate content consumption device, but many still to wonder if they’ll ever be capable of replacing notebooks for portable content creation.

While tablets may never truly replace notebooks for all of our content creation needs, especially typing intensive ones, a new crop of apps for iOS and Android are certainly making a case for it.

A little doodle made with the glorious new #Paper app for the iPad from @FiftyThree

(via Brian Taylor from CandyKiller: A little doodle made with the glorious new #Paper app)

Recent creative apps like Paper by fiftythree, Adobe’s Photoshop Touch and Apple’s iPhoto for iOS have just started to scratch the surface of the creative capabilities of powerful mobile devices. These apps show us that mobile creativity, when done right, can harness the unique properties of a touchscreen handheld device to offer new capabilities that a laptop cannot duplicate. Drawing with a stylus in Paper, for example, feels remarkably precise and expressive because of a neat gesture trick- the speed of your pen controls the thickness of the line. Similarly, in Photoshop Touch and iPhoto, editing your photos by actually putting your hands on them, while less precise than a keyboard and mouse, can be a revelation for broad stroke tasks like blending two images.

Tablets clearly have the processing power, the battery life and display resolution necessary to become serious creative tools, but there’s one thing missing: color. Creative professionals normally work on displays capable of showing a range of colors that is as much as 60% wider than even the latest “high color saturation” iPad. Artists need to see the content they are creating in the same vibrant colors they see in the real world.  Improving the color performance on mobile devices will make tablets truly worthy of a place in any creative professional’s regular workflow.

Apple’s new iPad boasts better colors – how did they do it?

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Back to share more of our display measurement results from the new iPad. Side note before we jump in: this is a somewhat technical post, if you aren’t familiar with the general workings of an LCD, this great live teardown by Bill Hammack is worth watching: http://youtu.be/jiejNAUwcQ8

There are two ways to improve the color gamut performance of an LCD display: you can either make the backlight better or the color filters better. In both approaches, the goal is the same: to make red, green and blue light as pure as possible. The LCD display mixes these three primary colors to make all the other colors you see on screen, thus, the more pure the individual pimary colors are, the better all colors on screen are.  Based on our measurements, it looks like Apple focused on the color filters for this new display, let’s take a closer look.

In the color spectrum chart below, you can see the result of some of the color filter changes that Apple made. Notice how the red peak (on the right, in the 600 nm range) has moved to a longer wavelength. This change in wavelength means reds on the new iPad will have a deeper hue, will be less orange and more distinctly red.

Another interesting thing to look at here is the blue peak at about 450 nanometers. In our last post, we noted that blue got the biggest boost with the new display. However, the blue peak did not change in wavelength or in shape, only amplitude (or brightness), which does not affect color. So what explains the dramatic improvement in blue seen on the new display?

The above spectrum isn’t telling the whole story. It was measured from a white screen, in other words a screen with all three primary colors turned on. We see very different results when looking at a screen with a blue image, where only the blue sub pixel filters are open.

This chart shows us only the light that is allowed to pass through the blue color filters. We can see the same blue peaks that we know from the white spectrum, but there’s also some extra light getting through – notice the two small tails to the right of the blue peak? That’s green light from the backlight leaking through the blue filter.

This means that when the iPad display needs blue light to make an image, some of that green comes along with the blue whether you want it or not. You will notice that the green blip is smaller on the new iPad, meaning less green is leaking through and a purer blue is displayed.  Take a look at the comparison shot here and you can see how just a hint of that green leakage is making the iPad 2’s blue (on left) appear slightly aqua by comparison.

Blue color filter comparison: iPad 2 on left, new iPad on right

Leakage like this happens because its very difficult to make a truly perfect color filter and even harder to make one that is efficient enough for a mobile display. The reason is basic physics – a better color filter is narrower, allowing only the desired color through.  However, the narrower you make the filter, the less light it lets through, and less light through means the display has to be driven harder to maintain brightness. This directly affects battery life, partially explaining the new iPad’s need for a larger battery.  Based on our experience, we estimate that the color improvements alone in the new display probably cause it to consume about 20-30% more power than the iPad 2’s screen.

Perfecting the color performance of a display is a critical engineering challenge and worth highlighting because its one of those tiny details that Apple is so great at. Just making this small improvement in light leakage from iPad 2 to the new iPad accounts for a stunning amount of improvement in color performance and, most importantly, it makes for a richer user experience.

Apple’s new iPad display; what does 44% more color get you?

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Last Friday Apple released an updated version of one of their hottest products, called simply “the new iPad.” Central to the update is a brand new display featuring significantly more resolution and color saturation. Since the resolution bit has been covered to death by others and we’re interested in color here we thought we’d take a closer look at Apple’s color saturation claims.

Our new iPad arrived on Friday and since then we’ve submitted it to several tests using our Photo Research PR 655 Spectroradiometer.

Using the new iPad, particularly next to an “iPad 2,” the reds and greens are noticeably better, but the blues in particular are quite striking. It actually makes the blue on the iPad 2 seem more ‘aqua’ than pure blue. The color data bears this out.  According to our measurements, Apple has significantly increased the saturation in all three primaries, most notably in blue:

The key color claim that Apple made on stage at the iPad announcement was that the new iPad has 44% more color saturation.  What they mean by that of course depends on the context.  There are a couple of different color measurement standards that Apple could be gauging the performance of the new iPad against such as CIE 1931 or CIE 1976.

An easy way to think about these standards is a bit like the temperature measures that we are all familiar with, Celsius and Fahrenheit, in that they are different ways communicating the same information. Saying, “it’s 5 degrees warmer today” means something very different to users of each system and its much the same way with color spaces, only we’re talking about measuring how the eye perceives color, not how warm it is outside.

We should also note that when people in the display industry talk about color saturation as a percentage, it is common practice to refer to a color gamut standard within a CIE color space. There are many color gamut standards in use today including: NTSC, sRGB, Adobe RGB 1998, DCI-P3, and rec 709. Each of these standards is a subset of a CIE color space. They are typically used by content creators to ensure the compatibility of their work from device to device. For example, if I create an image in Adobe RGB, I would like to display it on a screen that can show all of the colors in Adobe RGB in order to make sure it accurately reproduces all the colors in my original shot.

Based on our measurements it looks like Apple is referring to the NTSC gamut within a color space. But which color space do they mean?

A 44% improvement within the CIE 1931 color space would give the new iPad the equivalent of the sRGB standard used by HDTV broadcasts, Blu-Ray and much of the web. Given the significance of achieving that standard, some thought Apple must have been trying to say “sRGB” without confusing consumers by describing the meaning of various color standards.

According to our data, this is not the case. The new iPad only manages about 26% more saturation over the iPad 2 when measured against the CIE 1931 NTSC color space. However, the unit we measured showed a 48% increase in saturation when measured in the CIE 1976 color space, so that must be Apples frame of reference.

Measurements and standards aside, the new display looks great. The improvement in color performance will greatly enhance the user experience, and as we discussed yesterday, show’s what Apple is betting on for the functionality of future devices.

In our next post we will explain exactly how Apple achieved this improved color performance and look at ways they can improve the next generation.

John Gruber on new iPad design compromises

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Apple made the display a priority with its latest iPad release, breaking an unwritten rule that their products should get thinner and lighter with each release, not the other way around. John Gruber of daringfireball.net hit the nail on the head in his review of the new iPad:

Which brings us to an immovable object meeting an irresistible force. Apple doesn’t make new devices which get worse battery life than the version they’re replacing, but they also don’t make new devices that are thicker and heavier. LTE networking — and, I strongly suspect, the retina display3 — consume more power than do the 3G networking and non-retina display of the iPad 2. A three-way tug-of-war: 4G/LTE networking, battery life, thinness/weight. Something had to give. Thinness and weight lost: the iPad 3 gets 4G/LTE, battery life remains unchanged, and to achieve both of these Apple included a physically bigger battery, which in turn results in a new iPad that is slightly thicker (0.6 mm) and heavier (roughly 0.1 pound/50 grams, depending on the model).

50 grams and six-tenths of a millimeter are minor compromises, but compromises they are, and they betray Apple’s priorities: better to make the iPad slightly thicker and heavier than have battery life suffer slightly.

This point can’t be understated. For Apple, the quality of the display, both in terms of resolution and color gamut, is so critical to the experience of using an iPad that they were willing to make some major tradeoffs. In this case they not only ended up with a slightly thicker, heavier device, they also used a significantly more expensive part. The end result is a stunning display that amplifies everything that was already great about the iPad 2 so it looks like a tradeoff worth making.

We took some color performance measurements of our new iPad this morning and we’ll be posting more details shortly.