David B. Brooks Blog

No this is not an article about politics, the Progressives against the party of NO!, both confronted by those apparently drinking something stronger than “tea” that want to blow up, destroy, or whatever to everything governmental. The computer world is beginning to also be a tangle of conflicting paths going in different directions with a mystery goal no one is talking about.

Today was the first one that the Apple iPad was delivered to customers. That was interesting considering there were long lines at every Apple store of people who had pre-ordered an iPad. They could just as well stayed home and their new iPad would have been delivered to them. So why stand in-line? There were also reams of commentary in my news gathering this morning, mostly vacant observations of course. But there was one telling insight of the fact unlike computers which are used to work and create stuff, the iPad is designed as a consumer of stuff. My computers are used mostly to do research, process and edit images and write articles and blogs. But I must admit I just bought another iMac, this time to replace my cable box to download entertainment, and that is consumption.

In the old days of computer digital imaging those big heavy CRT monitors at least matched printers and printer paper in brightness, so no too dark prints. With today’s LCD displays most are now made as cheap as possible for home/office computing and are two to four times as bright as those old CRT monitors, which for most computing is is an advantage, but not for digital photographers who want to color anD brightness match screen and print.

There are some things worth repeating. For serious digital photographers who edit their images with a computer until recently you could only see a little more than 2/3rd’s of the color in the original on-screen image displayed, and if you can’t see it you cannot control and adjust it accurately. What I am talking about is that a dSLR set to record in raw format or a scan of a color transparency produces a range of different colors about what the Adobe RGB (1998) profile will support, but until just a short while ago all but some very special and expensive LCD displays only reproduce sRGB color that is a colorspace that has about 30% fewer colors. In other words most of us have been working with photographs that contained many fewer colors on-screen than the original.