It was brought to my attention earlier this year that there are two classes of LCD panels. I always thought I was up to date with these details, but I was totally unaware of this one.
You may recall that LCD screens were expensive for a long time, then suddenly the price dropped, and all these affordable panels appeared, boasting fast response times (5 ms) and so on. Well that's because these cheaper panels were "6 bit" panels. That is, instead of having a colour range of 8 bits per pimary (red, green, blue) and being able to display 16 million colours (2^24), they only have 6 bits per channel (2^18 or 262,144 colours). The LCD controller peforms "dithering" to increase the apparent colour range.
You may have noticed on your cheap home LCD that when looking at your digital photos, that flat areas like skies would have "banding", and that your "cleartype" fonts looked a bit oddly coloured in the aliased regions? Well that is all to do with only 64 (rather than 256) shades of each colour being available!
This can be seen in the pricing too. The 24" Samsung 245B costs about $500 - that's the cheap 6 bit panel, whereas the "professional" 245T model costs $1000 - that's the 8 bit panel. The same is true of the Dell "entry level" 24in (yep, 6 bits) and the corresponding "Ultrasharp" which is an 8 bit panel.
You have been warned!
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