The reason why I suspect so many want a full 10-bit path on wide gamut displays dates back to a 2004 post by Karl Lang, the fellow who designed PressView and Sony Artisan. 1) A wide gamut LCD display is not a good thing for most (95%) of high end users. The data that leaves your graphic card and travels over the DVI cable is 8 bit per component. You can't change this. The OS, ICC CMMs, the graphic card, the DVI spec, and Photoshop will all have to be upgraded before this will change and that's going to take a while. What does this mean to you? It means that when you send RGB data to a wide gamut display the colorimetric distance between any two colors is much larger. As an example, lets say you have two adjacent color patches one is 230,240,200 and the patch next to it is 230,241,200. On a standard LCD or CRT those two colors may be around .8 Delta E apart. On an Adobe RGB display those colors might be 2 Delta E apart on an ECI RGB display this could be as high as 4 delta E. It's very nice to be able to display all kinds of saturated colors you may never use in your photographs, however if the smallest visible adjustment you can make to a skin tone is 4 delta E you will become very frustrated very quickly. 2) More bits in the display does not fix this problem. 10 bit LUTs, 14 Bit 3D LUTs, 10 bit column drivers, time-domain bits, none of these technologies will solve problem 1. Until the path from photoshop to the pixel is at least 10 bits the whole way, I advise sticking to a display with something close to ColorMatch or sRGB. 3) Unless the display has "TRUE 10 bit or greater 1D LUTs that are 8-10-10" user front panel controls for color temp, blacklevel and gamma are useless for calibration and can in fact make things worse. An 8-10-8 3D LUT will not hurt things and can help achieve a fixed contrast ratio which is a good thing. Only Mitsubishi/NEC displays with "GammaComp" have 8-10-8 3D LUTs at this time. Some Samsung displays may have this I don't test many of their panels as the performance in other areas has been lacking. Only the Eizo 210, 220 and NEC2180WG have 8-10-10 paths. If you really want to know... the path in the Eizo is "8-14bit3D-8-10bit1D-10" go figure that one out 😉 The 2180WG has an actual 10 bit DVI interface with a 10-10-10 path but nothing supports it so you can't use it yet - but for $6500 your ready when it does 😉
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