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Path: utzoo!watmath!water!watcgl!kdmoen
From: kdmoen@watcgl.UUCP (Doug Moen)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: Colour Macintoshes
Message-ID: <2140@watcgl.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 30-Jun-85 23:17:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: watcgl.2140
Posted: Sun Jun 30 23:17:21 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 1-Jul-85 08:13:58 EDT
References: <134@avsdT.BERKNET> <170@apple.UUCP> <503@aicchi.UUCP> <1017@cbdkc1.UUCP>
Reply-To: kdmoen@watcgl.UUCP (Doug Moen)
Distribution: net
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 40

>I would be unwilling to give up the Mac's super readable B&W screen
>for a few bits of color. I have used an IBM (yuck!) PC with their 
>brand of color monitor and it stinks! The damn thing aint readable! 
>I also think that it will be a few years before we see a color Mac that
>compares to the current one in readability.

I agree.  A colour Mac with a display as good as the present B&W mac
would be too expensive.  I would be much more interested in
seeing a Mac with 4 bits per pixel, and 16 levels of grey.

There are lots of nice things you can do with grey levels:
 - anti-aliased text and lines
 - better looking patterns (eg, the grey desktop)
 - better highlighting.  dimmed text and icons are readable. text and graphics
   can be highlighted by making them brighter than normal.


The Quickdraw documentation seems to imply that a future colour mac
will support 8 fixed colours: white, black, red, green, blue, magenta,
cyan, yellow.  This would be unfortunate, if true.  With such a colour
space, you can't do anti-aliasing, and it's hard to do nice looking
graphics when all the available colours contrast with one another.

You can get around this problem with a colour map (which costs extra).
Unfortunately, colour maps have their own problem:  you can't put 2
images designed to be displayed using 2 different colour maps on the
screen at the same time.  You would run into this problem whenever
you tried to transfer a picture via the clipboard between 2 documents
using different colour maps.

You can get around the problem with colour maps by going to 24 bits
per pixel.  Unfortunately, this costs a *lot* extra, and screen
updates become prohibitively slow.


In other words, I think grey levels are more flexible and more cost
effective than colour.

Doug Moen (watmath!watcgl!kdmoen)
University of Waterloo Computer Graphics Lab