Post a Comment
News and New Products
Color Gets Deep
By Jessica Davis -- Electronic News, 8/16/2006
Just when you thought video games couldn’t get more vivid with their mere millions of colors displayed, the Sony Playstation 3, shipping in November, is expected to be capable of rendering billions of colors.
Called “Deep Color,” the technology relies in part on the next generation of interface for display and rendering devices – High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) 1.3, and it fixes an issue that has hampered end-user enjoyment of high definition content.
While high definition content may exist and be provided by cable television companies, DVD makers or game creators, by the time it arrives at the consumer display or rendering device, that high definition has been lost by client devices --set top boxes, game consoles or displays -- that cannot display high definition content.
Sony’s Playstation 3, however, is on track to change that this fall as the first device with the capability to render that high definition content. Still, Playstation buyers will have to wait for a Deep Color-enabled display, but those are on the way as well. Several companies are working on products that offer Deep Color, even though they have not yet announced their plans, said Dale Zimmerman, VP of worldwide marketing at Silicon Image.
“Sony Playstation 3 will be the first device to have HDMI 1.3, but many TV makers are gearing up for this too,” Zimmerman said. “Our belief is that in the future other devices such as Blu-Ray will offer it too.”
Silicon Image this week announced a receiver that supports HDMI 1.3 and that is designed for display devices. In addition the company has two input receivers and a transmitter for the technology.
“We can’t mention names but there are already customers in production with this technology, both on the source side (set top boxes, PCs and game machines) and the display side,” Zimmerman said.
He expects many of these products to be announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. They will offer the most noticeable difference in sections of a movie or game that are dark.
“Traditional 24-bit color is very limited. It’s only just now that new sources and new content is coming out that lets people go to higher bit depth,” he said. “Would you notice the difference in every single scene? Probably not. But if there’s a scene in a two-hour movie that is messed up then that movie is messed up for you. You would notice the difference in the first day.”
Because the technology is relatively inexpensive to implement – 1 percent of the bill of materials cost for displays, and maybe about 10 percent for game consoles -- Zimmerman believes that the market adoption rate will be fairly quick.
“It’s going to be a huge market,” he said. Zimmerman believes the technology will penetrate the upper half to upper third of the market almost immediately.
