HP brings studio colour to notebook

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 12 August 2008 04:32

Your IT - Home IT

One of the problems with the screens used on most notebooks is that they can only display a relatively limited range of colours. HP has realised there's a market segment that needs something a lot better.

A typical notebook LCD only uses six bits of data for each of the red, green and blue signals. That gives a maximum of 262,144 colours - way short of the 16,777,216 supported internally with 24-bit colour.

Notebook manufacturers typically apply software techniques such as temporal dithering (rapidly alternating the colour of a particular pixel to simulate an in-between shade) to overcome the hardware limitations.

This is usually fine for users who spend most of their time working with spreadsheets, email and web pages, but photographers, videographers and other graphics specialists are often more demanding.

As previously reported, HP has collaborated with DreamWorks Animation to produce the DreamColor LP2480zx Professional LCD Display, which provides one billion colours and consistent colour accuracy.

The company has now brought a cut down version of the DreamColor display to the notebook world.

The HP EliteBook 8730w has a 17in DreamColor display capable of displaying true 24-bit colour.

Other features include an Intel quad-core processor, 8G of RAM, and new-generation NVIDIA Quadro FX graphics with up to 1G of dedicated video memory.

So when can you get one and how much will it cost? Find out on page two.