Wide Gamut Displays with OSX

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Wide Gamut Displays with OSX

I guess this is the most appropriate forum for this question.

There are now a lot of wide-gamut monitors out in the market. In non color-aware applications, the colors on these monitors look terribly over-saturated. In a color-aware application, like Photoshop or Firefox 3, things look fine.

OS X itself doesn't seem to be color-aware. Most noticeable are the Close / Minimize / Expand buttons in the corner, the red and green are awful. Even after calibrating, things still look bad.

Are there any plans to make OS X more color aware, so that when a wide gamut monitor is used, correct colors are displayed?

Macbook Pro + Planar PX2611W Monitor, Mac OS X (10.5.5)

Posted on Nov 5, 2008 5:51 PM

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Answer 1

nerowolfe

Level 6

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Nov 5, 2008 5:57 PM in response to kvcrawford

Welcome to Apple Discussions:
These fora are user-to-user and the question you are asking should be directed to Apple.
The contact information for Apple is at the lower right of this forum page.
Making suppositions, conjectures etc. about future Apple products violates the terms of use of these fora.

"Unless otherwise noted, do not add Submissions about nontechnical topics, including:
Speculations or rumors about unannounced products."
http://discussions.apple.com/help.jspa

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Answer 2

orangekay

Level 5

4,085 points

Nov 5, 2008 6:05 PM in response to kvcrawford

Color management is built into the OS (specifically, into Quartz), unfortunately, the people who did the building don't really have any real world experience using it, so what you get is a giant mountain of guesswork and missing features. It doesn't help that ColorSync's codebase is perpetually stuck in 1996 while its lone maintainer spends his days playing Wolfenstein and banning people who complain about his lack of effort from the ColorSync mailing list, either.

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Answer 3

kvcrawford Author

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Nov 5, 2008 8:34 PM in response to nerowolfe

So is there not an e-mail address I can e-mail to ask questions like this? Only phone numbers?

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Answer 4

kvcrawford Author

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Nov 5, 2008 8:36 PM in response to orangekay

Yeah, I know there is color management, but the point is that it doesn't work for wide gamut displays. I was hoping that maybe the new LED ACD would be wide-gamut and they would update OS X (it is problem that is completely fixable with software). I just want my $750 planar IPS to look decent outside of firefox / photoshop 😟

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Answer 5

orangekay

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Nov 5, 2008 8:50 PM in response to kvcrawford

Join the ColorSync user's mailing list and wait for John Gnaegy to wake up long enough to post.

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Answer 6

Network 23

Level 6

12,333 points

Nov 5, 2008 9:15 PM in response to kvcrawford

There are big problems with this at Apple. They might be coming around, though; it is said that Snow Leopard will finally switch to gamma 2.2. That won't solve most of the problems, though.

This web page describes some of the issues, specifically with Safari.

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Answer 7

kvcrawford Author

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Nov 6, 2008 10:47 AM in response to Network 23

I guess I can only hope that they will address the issue with Snow Leopard. As far as 1920x1200 resolution, professional-quality, standard-gamut IPS monitors go the pickings are pretty **** slim. You can either get the Apple Cinema Display with its single input, or you can get the NEC 2490 with its high cost and internal hardware that adds input lag. All other options are wide-gamut.

I feel like crying 😟 I'm not a software dev but c'mon, the open source Firefox 3 has got it down just fine, how hard is it to add wide-gamut support to the otherwise excellent OS X?

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Answer 8

orangekay

Level 5

4,085 points

Nov 6, 2008 10:51 AM in response to kvcrawford

Considering the fact that ColorSync hasn't seen any serious work since System 7 and is still wholly dependent on deprecated APIs Apple no longer supports, pretty difficult.

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Answer 9

kvcrawford Author

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Nov 6, 2008 11:57 AM in response to orangekay

lol... well, this is disheartening. Is there anything else that can be done? I've already joined the mailing list and asked about wide gamut support.

I guess apple has chosen to hide and stick with standard gamut displays, rather than push software development for the ability to properly support more-capable technology. This is ridiculous considering Apple's loyal creative professional userbase...

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Answer 10

orangekay

Level 5

4,085 points

Nov 6, 2008 2:55 PM in response to kvcrawford

Not half as ridiculous as their decision to pull an 8-bit bait-and-switch with their recent displays. Those cases got swept under the rug pretty quietly, and even mentioning them here tends to get your posts deleted.

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