SpiceWare's Blog

I'd suggest Googling "30 bit color test image" or similar.

 

I should do that too...

 

That's the first thing I did - though on DuckDuckGo. Didn't find anything.

 

Nice! Wonder how those D700s would handle Star Craft 2 on a 4K display.

 

Odd that the resolution is reported wrong, this guy noticed it too. It appears to only happen when using external monitors as his iMac correctly shows 5120x2880 Retina for the build in screen, but incorrectly shows 1080x1920 for the 4K monitor used in portrait mode. He has one of your PA302W monitors hooked up to his Mac Pro.

The prior post by that guy at the Macintosh Performance Guide had feedback from a reader with this link in it:

 

Demo/Trailer Ultra-HD/4K: 10 Bits UHD Videos

 

I tried downloading a few, IMAX - Trailer worked but the rest would frequently become blocky during playback - kind of like satellite TV during a heavy rainstorm. I checked and my VLC install is current. QuickTime won't play them.

 

There's a bunch of interesting info on that site, I'll be checking it out later as it's time for bed.

As far as apps go, I'm pretty sure both Acorn and Pixelmator were updated with deep color support recently. Not sure if they posted any example images, but you should be able to see it if you create a gradient in either of those apps. The deep color version will be noticeably smoother on your display.

I'll check them out, thanks!

My monitor at work actually comes up as 32-bit color. I think that means I can see ghosts and invisible stuff.

 

What I've read says that 32-bit color is really 24 bit color + 8 alpha, so where my Mac Pro is showing 30-Bit Color (ARGB2101010) you'll see 32-Bit Color (ARGB8888). The screen grab from his Mac Pro shows 30-Bit, while the screen grab from his MacBook Pro shows 32-Bit.

 

32-bit color

 

Some Macs may say 32-bit color. 32-bit color means 24-bit color + one 8-bit alpha channel.

 

It is curious that 30-bit/10-bit color does not support (or at least does not indicate) the availability of an alpha channel for “40-bit color”.

I have noticed a minor annoyance with the new monitors. Whenever I change inputs, to switch between my work PC and my Mac Pro, the monitor does not maintain connection to the port that's not being displayed (I added a new screenshot to the blog entry showing this).

 

At this point the computer thinks the monitor was physically unplugged, so it consolidates all the open windows to the monitor I hadn't yet switched inputs on (it's hard to change inputs on two monitors at exactly the same time when you're also walking on the treadmill ) At least it puts the windows back to the appropriate display when I change the monitors back to the Mac.

 

My KVM is only a single monitor model so I always had to manually switch one of the old Dell monitors over after changing the KVM. The old monitor always maintained the connection.

Forgot to follow up on this - Windows does not nicely restore the windows to their appropriate display. Instead, it shrinks every window to 580x480^* and consolidates them to a single monitor. I have to manually resize them and put them back to their appropriate display.

^* not 640 because I keep the taskbar on the right edge of the screen

I'd suggest Googling "30 bit color test image" or similar.

A couple years later and I finally found a couple demos.

 

The first shows a gray-scale going across the screen. Bottom of the screen is using 8 bit, top is using 10 bit.

 

The second shows a rotating test pattern. Left side is 8 bit, right side is 10 bit.

 

I played them with the current version (3.0.0) of VLC. Difference is quite noticeable in full-screen, more subtle when scaled down in a window.