First an introduction. I'm Greg Staten and I'm the DreamColor Architect within Displays Engineering at HP. I was the designer of the new Z27x and Z24x DreamColor displays. I'll be regularly checking this forum and am happy to answer any and all questions regarding this display. To answer a few open questions and make a few comments:
I'm really curious if they retained the RGB backlight as those parts were incredibly expensive and delicate to match. I imagine they're probably using the RG with red pospher now...
We do you a BGr backlight (blue and green LEDs with a red phosphor) as the RGB LED is prohibitively expensive and the backlight manufacturers really don't want to make them as the yields are extremely low - hence the price. That said, the bgR backlight has been custom tuned and is very tightly sorted. We also use a custom chemical mix for the cell RGB filters. The primary reason we did this is that your typical display's blue isn't the right wavelength of blue (but is more easily manufactured). The problem, though, is that the wavelength typically used results in a blue that isn't on the common hue line for the standard (BT.709, P3, etc.) blue and hence most displays cannot accurately reproduce blue. (In most instances, the blue primary is offset negatively in x and positively in y, therefore impacting tones along the blue/green line.)
We had a custom panel designed that put the blue primary outside the primary target
and on the common hue line. This means that with very careful binning of the LED/phosphor modules the main variable in blue primary location is the thickness of the blue filter applied to the cell. Being on the common hue line means that the native blue primary will in essence only vary in saturation and we have placed it far enough outside the target primary value that we've are able to reliably hit the primary value during calibration. (BTW, a little secret about LCD displays: the error that is typically allowed for a native primary in LCD panels is 0.03 CIExy! This is industry-wide and the only way you can tighten that spec is to pay for additional sorting at the factory - which means that panels that don't hit the tighter spec are discarded and the cost of those panels rolled into the overall cost you pay for each panel.)
I think what they're saying is 10-bit FRC (aka "fake 10-bit") doesn't necessarily look crappy.
Agree. You can make 8+2 FRC panels that look extremely good and there are both spatial (within frame) and temporal (between frame) dithering that can be used. The Z24x is an 8+2 FRC display and looks quite good. The main limitation of FRC comes when looking at subtle shading across a narrow tonal range and the most common place where artifacts can be seen is in skies, mostly manifesting itself in a grain-like pattern that is an artifact of the dithering.
The Z27x is a true 10-bit panel and provides an additional 2 bits of FRC (so you could call it a 10+2 FRC display, but I typically just refer to it as 10-bit). In this case the dithering is used not so much to add additional tones to the image, but to reduce the higher internal bit precision to that the panel can accept. Proper spatial dithering typically produces better results than truncation. (Incidentally, the Z27x, while capable of both temporal and spatial dithering, ships with temporal dithering disabled. This was done based on feedback from animation/vfx houses that beta tested the display. If desired, though, temporal dithering can be turned back on using the monitor's API.)
Does anybody know when this will be released to retailers? It seems that as of now the zx monitors can be bought only from the official US HP online store...
It has been released to retailers, but it may take a bit longer to reach retailers in the EU. It has been available from BH Photo Video in the US for a couple of weeks now and I know that most of the distributors in the US have inventory now. I will check with the EU folks, but typically it takes a while for these to filter through to all of the retailers. You may have better luck contacting a specialty reseller.
One last thing that I thought I'd mention. One of the unique features of this display is that the calibration engine is built into the display. This means you directly connect an instrument to the display for calibration. We support not just an HP-branded X-Rite i1Display Pro, but also the entire line of Photo Research spectroradiometers, the Klein K10-A and the Konica Minolta CA-310. In addition, the calibration algorithms were developed in cooperation with the color scientists at several large animation/vfx houses and we are very proud of the accuracy - with a PR-740 I can calibrate the display across the entire grayscale, ColorChecker patterns and primary saturation/luminance sweeps to around 0.5 Delta E 2000.
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