6 Bit or 8 Bit Screen Dilemma

I’ve been looking for a new laptop and trying to find something that has an 8-bit screen, i.e. something that will give me print quality color proofing. You’d think that would be an easy task given the number of high-end laptops on the market these days, but alas no. My first thought was of course an Apple MacBook Pro – you’d think that would do it right? Wrong.

Apple, in their great wisdom and cost cutting drives opted to use a single light source (white) for their new LED screens. And while they may look nice and glossy, they still use dithering to create the illusion of a full color pallet. Pretty much all laptops on the market (with a few exceptions listed below) use 6 bit color output. Meaning they only produce thousands of color, not millions as many of the manufacturers claim.

The way they do this, is through a technique called dithering. Dithering uses two adjacent pixels displaying two separate colors, to create the illusion of a third color. It’s a way of tricking the eye, which is fine for general use, but if you need to see the true colors of your designs or photos, you need to see millions or colors, not thousands.

Apple used to claim that their laptop screens could support millions or colors, until a class action suit was filed; now you can’t find any information on color support, instead they just talk about how fast the graphics acceleration is.

Having done dozens of searches, I stumbled across a page for a Sony VIAO AW, that had a true proof quality screen; only problem was the $6000 price tag, and the fact that it had been taken off the market – mainly because it was too expensive.

With more digging I found out that HP’s EliteBook 8000 Series notebooks have an 8 bit screen option, but the user reviews were not exactly favorable, Lenovo’s ThinkPad W Series looks great, but again, it’s not a true 8 bit screen. Leaving only Dell’s XPS Studio 16, which while very cost effective, has a horrible battery life (30-45 mins) making it useless for work in the field. So I guess it’s back to square one. Come on Apple, if Dell can do it for less than a grand and a half, isn’t it about time you put pro screens in your pro laptops?

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Yannick Lord is a Los Angeles based Fashion, Glamour, Commercial and Lifestyle photographer with a passion for music, art, design, entertainment and technology. please feel free to explore these pages for more news, reviews and of course, my photography.