Next thing you know, DLP TV makers will be sued, since they can only display two possible colors at any given point in time. (Well, maybe 3 or 4 for those that use spiral color wheels.) They use "temporal dithering" to display all their colors & shades. Of course, the pixels change at thousands of times per second, so you can't tell. (Though the color wheel changes colors much more slowly, and you can notice it when you blink.)

Also, Saber Cherry, your math is a bit off. You counted black 3 times.

This is a stupid lawsuit with no technical merit. An 8-bit monitor can only display 768 different colors at once anyway, since red, green, and blue "sub-pixels" can only handle 256 colors each. Whether or not 6-bit panels look better or worse than 8-bit panels (and I agree that they look worse to me), it is illogical to claim that spacial dithering that fools the eye to blend sub-pixels into larger pixels with more colors can truly display "millions of colors" while temporal dithering that does the same thing cannot truly display "millions of colors". Last I checked, "millions of colors" was not defined by "temporal", "spacial", or even by being prefixed with an integer greater than 1. If "millions of colors" even has a definition, it was made by Apple's marketing department, since they're the only company that throws around the terms "thousands of colors" and "millions of colors" like they actually mean something.

Hance whips out his trusty scale of justice.

Consumers not being told the whole truth vs. Rich lawyers putting more money in their pockets. On one hand consumers get the shaft and apple isnt going to fix the problem on the other hand lawyers line their pockets and the consumers still get the shaft.

I think the best thing to do in a case like this is vote with your money and shop elsewhere. I see no reason to pad the pockets of lawyers when the people they claim to represent might get a coupon for 10 bucks off their next purchase.

@ Saber Perhaps you should send your resume to apple. Sounds like they could use your arguments.

*edit
@#% I know I hit reply. stupid browser.

Burn, apple!

"[We want] to help those customers who were deceived and make sure Apple tells the truth in the future," DailyTech quotes the legal firm's Managing Partner Brian Kabateck as saying.

Actually, I rather doubt this statement. I'm sure that what he meant to say was that he's delighted to be able to attempt to extort millions of dollars from any company he's able to persuade to part with it....;) In almost none of these suits that I'm aware of do "customers" get even a microscopic fraction of what the lawyers walk away with. That's exactly why, if you haven't noticed, that the "settlements" reached in lots of these cases are "secret" and never disclosed--the lawyers don't want it known when only they get paid and the "customers" they pretend to represent get absolutely nothing. Basically, the intent of all such lawsuits is "Pay us and we'll go away and stop bugging you." It's a shame, it really is.

I wouldn't mind the idea of "class-actions" so much if the lawyers were capped at 10% of the award with a mandated 90% of it going to the "customers" the lawyers are pretending to represent in the first place. Instead, what is almost always the case in such suits is that the lawyers get 90%-100% of the "award" while the "customer class" gets 10%-0%. Yes, 0%. In some of these cases that is literally true.

Who is this guy kidding? And further, it's the *customers* of the companies who have to suffer this kind of extortion who *pay the bill* the lawyers walk away with. The costs of extortion lawyers is always passed on. This ought to make the public realize it is in their interests to push for laws limiting this kind of behavior. For instance, right now a lawyer can find a buddy down the street who will serve as the straw complainant and together just the two of them can file a class-action lawsuit that pretends to be representing tens of thousands of people. I'd like to see the minimum bar for filing a class action be the names, addresses, and phone numbers of at least 5,000 real people who will actually sign an affidavit stating their grievance and their desire to be involved in such a case.

But I guess I'm just kidding myself. As long as we keep electing lawyers to political positions, they will keep passing laws which benefit the lawyer-class above everyone else.

By that standard (only colors a monitor can show are those of its sub-pixels), then yes, there is perfectly good cause for a law suit here. If Apple's monitors can only show 192 colors (going just by sub pixels), and they claim "millions of colors", that certainly sounds like lawsuit material to me.

Of course, every normal person is going to consider each pixel as a seperate unit, since that is about as small as you can see without breaking out a magnifying glass. On the other hand, since the dithering done by TN panels can't accurately reproduce millions of colors, they shouldn't be allowed to be advertised in that way.

I would be very happy if all LCD manufacturers/sellers would clearly mark their products as 6-bit or 8-bit sub-pixels, so people wouldn't have to play the panel lottery, or dig through tons of websites to find out what a particular model uses. No ambiguity there.

As a Macbook owner I'm a bit dismayed that the laptop monitor case was settled out of court. There are probably more Macbook owners than iMac owners.

I hope these lawyers take Apple to the cleaners on this, and set an example to other LCD makers. Blatant false advertising like this shouldn't be allowed.

I agree this "Millions of Colors" (or "16.2 Million Colors") claim needs to stop. I don't mind these monitors for simple tasks like office work, but it's silly to claim that dithering can increase color definition by over 20 times.

Another huge issue with TN panels is the viewing angle. Compared to VA-type and IPS monitors the viewing angles are atrocious with the colour and brightness changing with only a small tilt.