x.v.Color and Deep Color: Don't Believe the Hype- Yet

The 2007 TVs and HDMI 1.3 devices are showing up to market, and the hype machine is running full tilt. New TVs with wider color gamuts and far greater bit depths, and the ability to display as many as 68 billion colors! And if you can name all those colors, I'll buy you a cigar.

Let's slow down and acknowledge something here. It's great to buy TVs or anything else with greater and greater capabilities. That means you're that much more future proof. And in a few years, x.v.Color and Deep Color might be all the rage.

But make no mistake- other than perhaps a few camcorders, there aren't any broadcast or consumer HD sources that support x.v.Color or Deep Color. For your new TV to take advantage of either one, the source must either be captured using x.v.Color or Deep Color, or transferred from film using x.v.Color or Deep Color.

Our existing HD library, including everything coming out on Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD, does not conform. Nor does any HD broadcast we're aware of currently. In both cases increases bit depths would also take up a significantly larger amount of disc capacity. Talking with industry reps, it's believed that these new "standards" will first come to our TVs through gaming, if that's your thing.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't buy a TV with one or both of these features. And I'm not saying that these might not become very important in the future, I just don't want you buying a TV today and thinking these features will improve the colors you'll see on that TV with our current HD sources from broadcast and disc.

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