my understanding is that its a hardware limitation since the screen is only tft lcd.

 

I don't know the answer to the OP's question but I don't think tft lcd has a limitation of 65k colors. For example, the Palm pre has a tft lcd screen and can show 16M colors.

 

looks like im wrong then

 

This is almost definitely a hardware issue.

 

It's not necessarily a TFT issue, but it is a hardware issue. Also note that the Motorola Droid features a "24-bit" color screen, and it uses a TFT screen.

The HTC HD2 which many say shares the same screen with the Evo also features a 64k color (16 bit color) limitation. I'm not sure why the screen is limited like that but it seems that's the way it is with whatever screen they've sourced.

 

I'm pretty sure HTC wouldn't put such a weird limit on the phone, at BEST I could see it being upgraded support 262k colors but I have never heard of such a thing and again why wouldn't HTC make it that way if it could.

It's kind of disappointing this phone only has 65k colors when my 3 year old iPhone has 16m.

 

IIRC WM is the HD2 65k limit(?).

 

And the new iPhone will have an IPS display so we know it will be very good.

 

ill probably be disappointed with the display as a photographer but ill get over it.

 

Honestly, does this really matter? People find the strangest things to nit-pick about.

 

How big of a difference is it really? How many colors does a human eye process?

 

16M is not a spec I value as long as the 65k are vibrant, rich, and as clear as they can be. The best estimate for the human eye is 1-10M, but that's a pretty wide range and there are very few actual tests that have been able to resolve this issue. So many colors are such minor variations of each other that's it's quite effective to simply skip the ones that are almost imperceptable to each other.

Even if it takes an indistinguishable amount of it's probably not worthwhile to try to produce so many colors because we're all also somewhat color-sensitive to a certain range of colors yet almost color-ignorant of others. Our brains teach us to fill in colors with ones we're familiar with rather than try to pull them all apart or recognize them in such minute details of difference.

 

I have a hard time believing there isn't a noticable difference between 65k colors and 16M, but it's a tradeoff I'm willing to make for a giant 4.3" high res screen.

 

I'm not suggesting it's not noticeable, I'm suggesting it's not so big a gap that we're willing to care so much, especially on a 4.3" screen. Blow that up on a 60+" high definition display, and it's an entirely different story because the color differences will be more prominent.

It's no different than hearing. We can all hear the difference in music on $20k studio-quality speaker/monitors, but can we really here the subtleties in difference on headphones/earphones? We can to a point, but even the best headphone/earphone is no match for a top-end speaker/monitor array because small speakers simply cannot reproduce the range and dispersion because their size limits.

 

Along these same lines, is anyone really going to be watching video at such high quality that it matters? This is a 4.3'' screen that isn't even at 720p resolution. It isn't some giant LEDTV that you're going to be watching hi-def video on.

 

yes id notice it easily. when i had the diamond, the resolution was great but the 65k colors made my pics not as good as it could be. when i bought the pre, i was amazed how much my pics were true to its colors.

and now going back to the evo and its 65 colors, ill easily notice it.

and is it nitpicking? maybe. everyone has different lists to what they want the phone to do. i could care less about video chatting as i would NEVER use it. 4g? not much if any if its a battery hog.

it would be nice to display my pics on the huge screen. it will be noticeable to my eyes. certainly no deal breaker. lol

 

There is a lot of variance on how many colors a person can distinguish but its definitely no more than 10 million. Probably way way less for the average person.

65k is probably enough. In fact I bet if 2 identical screens were placed beside you, one with 16m colors and one with 65k, its unlikely youd be able to choose the different one correctly every time.

 

if thats towards me, i would every time.

 

Just for fun, I just set my PC's color display to 16 bit. I have to admit, I really can't tell the difference.

 

Same here, though I admit if the screen is 18bit, 262k colors (as apposed to 16bit 65k on the EVO) and had good dithering I would have a hard time telling the difference between that and a 16m color screen without looking for it.

Can anyone find this?

 

and I ride a unicorn to work every day.

 

Regarding the 65k colors thing, people have been giving the screen rave reviews and haven't said anything about a color deficiency (unless in direct comparison with an AMOLED display), so I'm not worried at all.

But only 65k does strike me as odd, since I'm pretty sure my monitor running Windows 95 could display 256,000 "colors" lol.