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Has anyone here noticed this "problem"?

This is bad.

It's not a lawsuit. It's a clown suit.

San Diego is home for the leading law firm in Class Action filings. They have been and are currently being investigated for several illegal acts in those filings, including paying plaintiffs to claim damages where none existed.

I'd like to see who the law firm is that filed this latest claim.

So who can recognise that their Mac does not have the advertised number of colors? Give me a break.

Nope. I and I use my MacBook Pro for photo editing and graphics all the time. I think Apple's gotten to the size where it's going to get sued by some idiot/s for just about anything. Hmm... now that I think about it, maybe I should sue the psychological torment caused by the delay of Leopard.

Representatives for the Law Offices of Peter M. Polischuk, attorneys representing the plaintiffs, had not returned inquires for comment as of press time.

"...are seeking multiple forms of relief and reimbursement"

Relief? Reimbursement? May I see some receipts please?

Let's file a lawsuit against them for stupidity.

God bless fuc... America. Where else can you find such stupidity? ... oh yeah the White House.

Um, the Mac is the preferred platform for creative designers - graphics, photography, video. These folks ought to care about color, as should Apple.

What an absolute pile of b******s.

The suit does have a point, however pedantic, if Apple advertises that it uses 8-bit displays yet is only using 6-bit displays.

The question is whether or not the Macbooks can display the entire range of 16.7 million colors or only 262,144. I doubt the human eye can see the difference, and it doesn't help that the complainants confuse the issue with talk of dithering. The fact is, all color displays use it! They all have colors side by side creating the illusion of full color.

"trick the human eye into perceiving the desired color..."
so you DO actually see the colors. how you get there is not important.
useless lawsuit!

Well, apparenty it is affecting my iMac display, becaue this lawsuit looks like bullsh!t on it.....

I really found this quite funny. Being a Lawyer (not an electronics expert) myself, I am very sure this will be dismissed once it goes before a Federal Judge, if it even makes it that far. I am sure the Corporate lawyers at Apple Inc. find this just as amusing as I do.

@ Gregg Thurman - The Firm backing the plaintiffs is: Law Offices of Peter M. Polischuk

I did a quick search on them using a law database. Seems they are nothing more than a small time firm taking on cases against corporate giants. Too much avail... I can't even find a website for them. My guess is this, they might have 'some' reasonable complaints but it's not enough for a class action suit, none the less, Apple Inc. can sit in court way longer than these people.

After reading 'some' of the PDF this is a frivolous suit for sure.

Lawyers are color blind. They only see shades of green.

"trick the human eye into perceiving the desired color..."
so you DO actually see the colors. how you get there is not important. useless lawsuit!

Yeah, that works well in print environments where it's CRITICAL to actually see what colors are going to be printed beforehand.

Moron.

Actually, I have noticed this problem. I do a lot of photo retouching on my 17" Intel MBP that includes making a clipping path and creating fake shadows. It's all too apparent to even the most untrained eye that the smooth gray gradients of the faked shadows show up as distinct stripes. Even the dithering trick doesn't offer any help here. The display is clearly not a full 8-bit display. Same thing goes for the iMac. The display is better when the MBP is connected to a 23" Cinema Display, but the effect is still noticeable.

My MacBook Pro looks better than any Vaio Dell or anything else.

Any Judge or jury would endorse that if they had them in front of them.

Then again judges in the UK are not that up to speed. This one had to have explained to him what a website was:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/18/njudge118.xml

Wasn't going to comment, but the MDW Magic Word = brown, and that just seems appropriate commentary on this lawsuit.

Your friendly Republicans have been actively seeking to reform tort law to minimize frivolous lawsuits unlike the Democrats (e.g. Al Gore) who never think any lawsuit is without merit.

So, when will you be sued for passing on your stupid genes?

My wife loves her MacBook and I love it when I use it to type notes, surf the web, etc. But I thought it was just me when I noticed the dithering in the menu bar and in other places. Plus, when I open up photos of my family, I can notice the dithering and banding in the flesh tones. I wrote it off as having bad files and not setting the display resolution properly. However, those same files look wonderful on the G5's display and the iMac's display. So, I checked the settings of the display on the MacBook and it said "millions of colors." At that point, I just assumed the display dithers the way it does on the MacBook because of the integrated graphics chip as opposed to a dedicated graphics card. But if what the lawsuit alleges is true, that is pretty messed up for Apple to be passing off 18 bit displays off as 24 bit displays.

I'm assuming Apple uses the same screen manufactures that PC box assemblers use. What do they use?

I would like to hear Apple's response. This is not a grey area. (no pun intended) The screens are either 6 or 8 bit. Which is it Apple?
What are they currently selling now? What did the PowerBooks use?

I can see the banding just using the color picker. You can call it up using TextEdit. Then choose the "spectrum" picker, and make the color picker palette really big. You can clearly see both horizontal and vertical stripes. And if you do the "display zoom" (hold control and spin your mighty mouse nipple) you can see clearly that the spectrum picker is using dither patterns.

The question is... is the spectrum picker just a poor implementation? Why does it need to dither? OR, is 24 bits actually not enough colour depth to be unnoticeable to the human eye? Or... as the lawsuit claims, maybe Apple's not using a full 8-bits per channel. If they're not... the lawsuit will hold no matter how pedantic a few people on this list may think it is. The banding is very obvious to almost anyone, if you just look. And that does strike me as being a problem that Apple will have to fix.

It seems that most of you don't understand the problem. Here it is explained for dummies:
The 18-bit color limitation (rather than 24-bit advertised specs) has nothing to do with the integrated graphics chipset, this is due to a low-quality panel. Just take a quick look at Wikipedia to understand what are the different types of TFT LCD panels, and you'll understand that for each notebook or TFT screen, the vendor (Apple, Dell, HP, Toshiba, etc.) can choose which quality of panel to use. It appears that for MacBook's and MacBook Pro's, Apple has chosen a lower quality panel with only 18-bits rather than 24-bits. This is very disappointing. I can tell you that my iMac G5 uses a high-quality 24-bit panel, but newer Intel iMac's use a lower-quality 18-bit panel, and you can really see the difference in quality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TFT_LCD

I think it's obvious that no matter what whatever they decide to do it'll be pretty close to whatever they think it'll have to be one way or another, because otherwise, no matter how hard they try the excuse that gets offered won't hold a candle to my argument or yours, despite the money that is spent trying to decide about how often they can make a go of it, remembering always that what you say isn't as important as what you do both in this life and in the next, which is often discounted, but rarely understood, no matter how often it is said (whether to the neophytes or the veterans), as long as they are perfectly clear that "color" and "dithering" are concepts and are therefore less objective than subjective, no matter what anyone else reads on this or any other blog where lawsuits are frequently covered, though without the depth of understanding and reporting that would appear to be necessary for the average reader to comprehend even the most basic first concepts covered, much less the startling realities that, while transcending the printed word, still begin there before unfurling their brilliance throughout the entire ecosystem in question.

You don't know the history of bullshit. I do.

I tend to agree with this. Apple's displays are not as good as others I have seen. That being said, Windows sucks so bad with it's lack of anti-aliasing and $hit interface, OS X still looks better. But if the charge has merit Apple should fix it.

I have to agree also. I returned a Macbook Pro because of this issue and got a 24 inch Intel iMac which is crystal clear in comparison. Go to an Apple store and look at the 15 inch Macbook Pro screen and then look at the 24 inch iMac screen. You cannot miss the difference. Trust me. I have been holding out hoping the next gen Macbook Pro will have a better display. Maybe this lawsuit will help shift things along at Apple and get this fixed.

"Well, apparently it is affecting my iMac display, because this lawsuit looks like bullsh!t on it....."


BWAAHAAHAA!

MW: OUR lovely judicial system, or litigation system, should I say.

Ooooh, I wanna sue the print industry, if you look really close all those photos in magazines are made up of little dots of colour, and there are only FOUR different colours and one is BLACK which isn't even a colour! They trick me into seeing millions of colours, those bastards! Tis witchcraft I say, burn them at the stake, then take them to court!

Maybe those new LED-LCD displays will be better.

i have not noticed any banding issues on my macbook or my intel imac, or my collegues' macbook pro's.
could this be an issue limited to a certain batch of laptops?

i tell you what though, dont try and tell me any dell or sony or toshiba laptop has a better display than any of apples lineup because they simply arn't in the same league.

Calling all Applelytes! Calling all Applelytes! Apple inc. needs you all to file a class-action lawsuit against all television makers, all computer monitors, all HD definition screens and all cinemas.

Why?

All CRT screens employ single line sweep of the CR gun to fool our eyes that we are seeing a complete picture. Technically our eyes are fed a series of lines which are combined by our brains to see a single picture.

HD display's do not show a high definition picture contrary to belief. Sony claims that Blue-Ray is the only true HD because the picture scan is from top to bottom in continous lines. (see CRT) They refute the other standard because they claim that it operates on the CRT principle which is to scan every other line, this they claim is not true HD.

Cinema screens employ a principle that fools our brains by displaying in very quick succession still images. Our eyes are continously relaying images to the brain faster than the brain can process.

So in reality when you break down all these systems of display, they prey on our inability to process images fast enough to actually breakdown the still image.

Computer screens when in use to display still images allow our brains to process the individual image and therefor the individual components that constitute the picture.

It is possible for our eyes to actually see a single pixel, I should know, my monitor has a dead pixel, it is very noticeable when the background colour is different to it.

So all Applelytes take arms!! Sue Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, Phillips, Bush, Panasonic, HP, Dell, DGM in other words ALL display makers and cinema halls.

Let us see how the courts and the judicial system decide to interpret frivolous lawsuits such as the one outlined above.

I'm color blind and cannot "see" thousands let alone millions of colors, can I join the lawsuit? People really need to get a life!

I came back to see if someone perhaps responded to my comment. I saw some other comments I did not understand so I went back and finished reading the PDF.

The problems I see within this suit is this:

A) They are using 'forum' posts as evidence of complaints about the resolution/pixilation of the displays. Some of them really aren't complaints from what I saw, either. In a court of law, opinions only go so far.

B) I don't know the software or hardware involved, but Apple Inc. knows good and well not to advertise 1,000,000 colors if it can't produce it. Seems to me, it's a matter of people speculating it's a million or it's not a million because of issues they have had, which, could have been isolated issues.

C) I think it's great that the complaint was filed May 3rd of 2007, yet, they purchased the computer March of last year. This will hold a lot of bearing on the case. Thats like ordering a steak at a Capitol Grill and eating most of it then tell the waiter/waitress that you want a free one because it was under/over-cooked.

I'm sure Apple Inc. will be fine with all of this overhead. I'm not going to presume they are innocent or guilty but I think after reading this claim, it's going to be rejected.

The eye can only see 32,000 colors. Point of fact.

@Mikeyo,

The assumption that the dithering problem was the integrated chipset stems from prior experience of video cards that could only output 16 bit color and being that the MacBook is the first Mac owned by my household that does not have a dedicated video card is not invalid as you infer. Furthermore, to insinuate that posters who do not have any hardware engineering expertise are dummies is crass. You could've presented your information in a more astute manner. Nonetheless, thank you for your point of information, as I will research it further beyond the limited information presented in Wikipedia.

I have absolutely noticed this. The dithering is very fine and does a good job even on complicated color ramps, but it is definitely there. In spite of this, the color representation on my MacBook screen is pretty good, even for relatively complex Photoshop work. The dithering doesn't bother me much, but I believe the suit has merit technically.

Where did you get your facts? That is not true at all.

Just one reference:

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2006/JenniferLeong.shtml

BTW, I have worked in the field of color for well over a decade.

- Chris

I've never noticed any of the colour banding, but I thought the idea of dithering was to prevent banding, like with the old gif files that used dithering with 256 colours. However, I don't like the shiny MacBook screens because the viewing angle is so narrow. If you tilt the screen it goes into a sort of reverse video in the dark areas. I use a MacBook Pro at work, but it's one with a matte screen, and the viewing angle is way better.

18-bit versus 24-bit in iMacs and MacBooks? Looks like good ol' Steve put the CRAP in CRAPPLE. I expect improvements in my technology, not cutting corners to fill Steve's pocket with more lucre. It seems that consumers don't have a choice, either. What a scum bag.

Well, the MacBook with its 1280x800 display cannot display more than 1,024,000 colors at a time because that it just does not have more pixels. The limit for the 17" MacBook pro is 1,764,000 colors/pixels.

So neither of them is capable to display _millions_ of colors. But if they are 18-bit only, they would display only 262,144 colors at a time which is clearly not even a single million.

I just checked the specs pf the MacBook (pro) on apple.com and was surprised that they do not mention color depth at all, only the resoluton is mentioned. The settings in the control panel affect the graphics card and not the display hardware.

As much as I hate to say it, if Apple is indeed promising millions of colors on its display and they are not capable of true 24-bit output, then the suit is valid. I think this is going to boil down to the wording and meaning of the sales text.

Anyone ever bought a walking stick? for yourself or someone else?

Sue! Sue! Sue! I have yet to see a stick that can walk!!!!!!

Hey trolls buy a effing clue. Virtually all laptops use TN (twisted nematic) displays because they consume a fraction of the power a standard TTL display does.
If you say that TN displays aren't capable of "real" 16 million colors because they dither 6 bit, then 80-85% of the desktop LCD's sold aren't capable either (including the crap from dell, acer, viewsonic and septre)

Poppycock, pure poppycock, I say. Why when I place my rose-colored glasses on, everything is just fine. Yes, just fine. La, la, la. Everything is fine. La, la, la. These glasses are great.

Apple made false claims and didn't deliver what they said they did, so they should compensate those they ripped off.

How many people buy their monitors because of the colours they need to display?

Shades from seven colours I might add.

Three when it comes to monitors at that!