64bit OS and color
 

Does anyone know if going to 64bit Windows will finally allow for 64bit color on the desktop? (As in I can actually see 16bit per channel color on my monitor) I know LCD displays would have to catch up, but it would be nice to not have to dither colors down to view them.

Believe it or not, Intel has supported integer based 64bit color processing since they introduced the Pentium MMX.

Wow, thats interesting. i hope someone knows.

I don't think so, at least not for the two most popular images types. Not sure about video. Graphic card manufacturers would have a ball with this one. I also think Micro$oft would be screaming that feature from their office windows by now.


JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
Best Output: Universally legible; viewable by all web browsers and image-editing programs
Compression & Color: Lossy; 8-bit grayscale, up to 24-bit color
Comments: Highly compressed images may contain ugly "artifacts." Used by most digital cameras.

GIF (Graphics Interchange Format)
Best Output: Web; viewable by all current web browsers
Compression & Color: Lossy; up to 256 colors
Comments: Best for icons and thumbnails; retains transparency; can be animated.

TIFF (Tagged Image File Format)
Best Output: Great for print; use it when best quality is required; not supported by web browsers
Compression & Color: Can be lossless; supports RGB, CMYK, LAB, and more; up to 64-bit color!
Comments: Super flexible; can contain multiple images but beware of ballooning file sizes.

jpeg2000 supports lossless compression. Also PNG and MNG both support 64bit color with lossless and lossy algorithms. Both support 16bit alpha channels. There are also proprietary graphics formats. What I'm talking about is the ability to actually view 64bit color, not a dithered down version of the image. There was hope that Matrox would give everyone true 40bit, bit you only get 2bit alpha when viewing images at 10bit resolution.

If I remember right, SGI Iris workstations offered true 64bit years ago, Don't know if they are still around. There is a movement in the Linux comunity to support 16bit per channel color on their desktop environments. Apple could have, but for some reason refused to do so. (Many Apple users have been requesting that feature for a long long time).

The graphics card makers can easily support it, they've stated in the past they could go all the way up to 256bit (64bit per channel).

Just wondering what's the hold up.

Economical Politics...?