HP Unveils New Color Technology for Desktop Displays

Developed with DreamWorks Animation, DreamColor aims to improve color consistency among desktop LCDs.

According to the companies, the HP DreamColor Technology will provide accurate color and a simple color-management process to ensure vision-to-production color consistency in a widescreen liquid crystal display (LCD). HP reports that the first display to use this technology will be launched sometime this summer and will generate true 30-bit color (enabling a range of 1 billion colors) in an LED-backlit LCD. The display will be available at a "fraction of the cost of most high-end, studio-quality LCD displays," HP states.

"For decades, storytellers have struggled to manage color in an accurate and consistent manner," said Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive officer and director of DreamWorks Animation. "Quite simply, when we make a movie about a big, green ogre, our concern is that our ogre is the same color of green throughout the film. HP has truly changed the game with its new display, giving DreamWorks Animation full visual fidelity across the board for the first time."

Yesterday, Katzenberg joined the National Association of Broadcasters Show via video feed as Todd Bradley, executive vice-president of the Personal Systems Group at HP, and Roger Enrico, chairman of DreamWorks Animation, unveiled the DreamColor Technology.

"In the digital world, the media and entertainment industry oftentimes sets the pace for technology innovation," said Bradley. "The HP DreamColor display is a disruptive technology inspired by users, like DreamWorks Animation, that challenge HP to deliver exciting innovations that truly impact our customers' businesses."

Designed for the broadcast, film/video post-production, animation, and graphic arts fields, the HP DreamColor Technology display reportedly will offer richer color and darker blacks than previously available through LCD display technology. The display will include factory presets for all color ranges specified by the NTSC, SMPTE, sRGB, Rec. 709, Adobe RGB, and DCI standards.

"HP has delivered a breakthrough technology that will show immediate results," said Crawford Del Prete, executive vice-president, Global Research, IDC. "The HP DreamColor display is an important innovation that represents a significant collaboration between HP and a core partner. This technology will have broad appeal, allowing customers to deliver results never before possible without very high-end systems."

The HP DreamColor Technology initiative is the result of a two-year collaboration between HP and DreamWorks Animation. The HP DreamColor Technology family will comprise a series of displays, printers, and related technologies that will work together to provide accurate, predictable color that allows users to manage the proper configuration of color across devices.

In other news, HP also announced the availability of two performance-boosted versions of the company's high-end personal workstation computers for digital content creation.

According to the company, the HP xw8600 and HP xw9400 quad-core workstations are available immediately. The xw8600 features two Intel Quad-Core Xeon X5482 processors and 1,600 MHz front side bus, as well as 800 MHz memory. The xw9400 offers a choice of three Quad-Core AMD Opteron 2300 processors. Both workstations are listed Electronic Products Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) Gold.