Apple’s “millions of colors” problem
Just today, an iMac owner sued Apple, Inc. in a class action lawsuit for deceptively marketing its “new 20-inch iMac in a way that grossly inflated the capabilities of its monitor, which is vastly inferior to the previous generation it replaced,” according to a press release by the plaintiff’s law firm, Kabateck Brown Kellner, LLP, that is based in California.
Apple reportedly told customers that both the 20-inch and 24-inch iMacs displayed “millions of colors at all resolutions”. The 24-inch iMacs do display 16,777,216 colors on 8-bit, in-plane switching (IPS) screens, as did the previous 20-inch iMac model. But the new 20-inch iMac monitors only display a paltry 262,144 colors, or 98% less than was promised.
It was only recently that Apple Inc. settled out of court a 10-month-old lawsuit by two Californian professional photographers over its MacBook Pro notebooks.
The charge was that they were fooled into purchasing MacBook Pros because they could display millions of colors. The lawsuit said that the displays were only capable of showing the “illusion of millions of colors through the use of a software technique referred to as dithering (it refers to an action made by a computer program to approximate a color from a mixture of other colors when the required color is not available).”
Many in the media and the tech blogosphere have questioned the seriousness of this lawsuit. To photographers Fred Greaves and Dave Gatley, it was definitely serious because they need an accurate display of colors to edit their work on computers.
Apple quietly settled an undisclosed amount out of court and the two plaintiffs accepted it because it seemed difficult to find other people who would want to join a class action suit based on the fact that they bought Macs because of the “millions of colors” claim.
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