kdmoen@watcgl.UUCP (Doug Moen) (07/01/85)
>I would be unwilling to give up the Mac's super readable B&W screen >for a few bits of color. I have used an IBM (yuck!) PC with their >brand of color monitor and it stinks! The damn thing aint readable! >I also think that it will be a few years before we see a color Mac that >compares to the current one in readability. I agree. A colour Mac with a display as good as the present B&W mac would be too expensive. I would be much more interested in seeing a Mac with 4 bits per pixel, and 16 levels of grey. There are lots of nice things you can do with grey levels: - anti-aliased text and lines - better looking patterns (eg, the grey desktop) - better highlighting. dimmed text and icons are readable. text and graphics can be highlighted by making them brighter than normal. The Quickdraw documentation seems to imply that a future colour mac will support 8 fixed colours: white, black, red, green, blue, magenta, cyan, yellow. This would be unfortunate, if true. With such a colour space, you can't do anti-aliasing, and it's hard to do nice looking graphics when all the available colours contrast with one another. You can get around this problem with a colour map (which costs extra). Unfortunately, colour maps have their own problem: you can't put 2 images designed to be displayed using 2 different colour maps on the screen at the same time. You would run into this problem whenever you tried to transfer a picture via the clipboard between 2 documents using different colour maps. You can get around the problem with colour maps by going to 24 bits per pixel. Unfortunately, this costs a *lot* extra, and screen updates become prohibitively slow. In other words, I think grey levels are more flexible and more cost effective than colour. Doug Moen (watmath!watcgl!kdmoen) University of Waterloo Computer Graphics Lab