Apple’s deep color-management advantage
- apr
- 24
When it comes to displays, density is already good enough. Now we need depth.
Back in March Apple slipped something into the 9.7-inch iPad Pro announcement that opened some eyes, but not nearly wide enough — DCI-P3 color gamut and dynamic "True Tone" color balance. The former was introduced with the Retina 5K iMac. The latter was all new. Both matter a great deal.
Craig Hockenberry, famed developer of Twitterrific, writing for The Iconfactory:
There's only one way for manufacturers to improve displays and gain a competitive advantage. They need to make the displays "deeper"; able to show a wider range of color. It's also clear from Apple's work that they see smarter displays, with things like True Tone technology, as a way to distinguish themselves in a crowded market.
Apple is in a unique position with regard to color management. They own a technology called ColorSync that first saw the light of day in 1993 with System 7.1 on the Mac. It's also been integrated at a system-level for all of the OS X releases. It's a very mature technology that recently made its way to mobile in the iOS 9.3 release.
On the other side of the coin, Android has no color management. Companies like Samsung are going to find it impossible to pull off something like True Tone and DCI-P3 without the aid of color management.
Apple's been individually calibrating iOS device displays for a while. It's why iPhone and iPad Pro are so consistent. The company had to take it to the next level and introduce OS X-caliber color management, though, to get True Tone to work. Especially under the more rigorous demands of the DCI-P3 — what digital movies now use — color space.
Once cameras are capturing in deep color, photos and videos are rendered in it, and every phone, tablet, PC, and projector can display it, we'll be well on our way to a more colorful future.
It won't be like the shift from black and white to color, but it will be like the shift from stereo to surround sound.
Craig's article includes a ton of explanation along with photo differentials, so check it out.