Dan Karron@UCBVAX.BERKELEY.EDU (12/15/90)
>In article <4195.2763c5cb@cc.helsinki.fi>, osmoviita@cc.helsinki.fi writes: >> In article <1990Dec8.160035.12417@odin.corp.sgi.com>, karlton@sgi.com >(Phil Karlton) writes: >> > see the full color capabilities of X11 R4, to use the Motif toolkit > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >> >> Will this say that we are finally going to see full 48bit RGB output in >> hardware too? (16 bit integers for each primary -- 16 bit DACs.) > > No, what this means is that a full range of Visuals will be available >to support the various hardware modes. For example there will be a 24 bit >TrueColor visual on machines with 24 bit planes. I think all SGI machines >use 8 bit DACs. It seems silly to me to use anything more since I don't >believe the human eye is that sensitive. Supposedly normal humans can only >see 6 bits, and some specially trained people like radiologists can see >8-10 bits gray scale. Since I have to live with eagle eye radiologists, I have had to compress 12-16 bit color/gray scale images to 8 bits to display the images on sgi machines. While the built in gamma correction is nice, I resent throwing away data bits to wedge an x-ray file image on an iris. I get around this by slowing down the whole show by using 16 bit color map and mapping the 12 bit data to 8 bit steps. You(sgi) are ignoring a large and important part of your future audience (and customers): Professional film interperters and soothsayers. I remember reading about the infancy of High Fidelity: People argued that the human ear could not hear what we now consider an important part of the audio spectrum. An important part of HiFi is you can boost the parts of the spectrum where the human ear is weak. One of the applications of computer graphics in radiology is to use the 6-10 bits of human eye resolution to encompass the 16-24 bits of dynamic range in medical images. Besides range compression, we want to NOT throw out important information, or squeeze it into imperceptability. Remember: we want information, not just pretty pictures. > >Jeff Weinstein - X Protocol Police >Silicon Graphics, Inc., Entry Systems Division, Window Systems >jsw@xhead.esd.sgi.com >Any opinions expressed above are mine, not sgi's. > +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | karron@nyu.edu (E-mail alias that will always find me) | | Fax: 212 340 7190 * Dan Karron, Research Associate | | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . * New York University Medical Center | | 560 First Avenue \*\ Pager <1> (212) 397 9330 | | New York, New York 10016 \**\ <2> 10896 <3> <your-number-here> | | (212) 340 5210 \***\_________________________________________ | | Main machine: karron.med.nyu.edu (128.122.135.3) IRIS 85GT | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
kurt@cashew.asd.sgi.com (Kurt Akeley) (12/18/90)
In article <9012151554.AA06362@karron.med.nyu.edu>, Dan Karron@UCBVAX.BERKELEY.EDU writes: ... |> You(sgi) are ignoring a large and important part of your future audience |> (and customers): Professional film interperters and soothsayers. I remember |> reading about the infancy of High Fidelity: People argued that the |> human ear could not hear what we now consider an important part of the |> audio spectrum. Jeff's comments about the limits of human visual perception should not be understood to be SGI policy; they represent his opinion only. Others of us here at SGI read Stereophile religiously, do not accept 8-bit DACs as the eternal "right" answer, and continue to work hard to improve the visual quality of our products. -- kurt p.s. just my opinion, of course