Thoughts on Sharp’s Quatron (Quad Pixel)

[Anonymous]

It doesn’t make any sense to me, but I’m a beginner at video calibration. Why that secondary color, why not one of the others, or why not all of them and have six pixels? Anybody calibrate one of these Sharp Quad Pixel TVs?

Topic

[Anonymous]

I haven’t had the (dis?)pleasure of calibrating one of them (I haven’t seen anyone that actually has any of them in hand yet), but the current thinking among the calibration community seems to be that the 4th color serves two primary purposes:

1) Make the image brighter, thus selling more TVs (you can get more brightness from yellow than green)
2) Make it so they can market the technology to the unsuspecting public as something new and cool, thus selling more TVs

This is second-hand information, so it needs confirmation, but apparently they are cutting the size of the green pixel in half in order to get a half-size yellow pixel. This will result in greater overall brightness of the image (especially white).

As for “more colors”, that is marketing verbiage since the rec709 specification says what colors are part of the broadcast standard. Most/all current LCD TVs can reproduce just about all the colors in that spec, especially when calibrated. They might artificially enhance yellows to push that secondary outside the rec709 triangle, but of course we’d bring that in when calibrating.

[Anonymous]

you might want to read this review and look at the Calman reports.

http://www.avforums.com/review/Sharp-LE821-LC-46LE821E-Review.html

and also

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/display_myths_shattered?page=0%2C4

[Anonymous]

Thanks Randy. Just what I was looking for.

[Anonymous]

Sharp has become King Midas. Sharp’s got the Midas touch.

and singing

…oh Mr. Sun, Sun, Mr. Golden sun, please shine down on me…

…all that glitters is gold…

…lean out your window, golden hair…

I guess I can stop now.

[Anonymous]

I found subtle green shading to be nearly nonexistent on the Quattron, though bright colors are vibrant and poppy after calibration.
They have some interesting calibration pitfalls- mainly with the CMS.
I wrote up a calibration report/review here:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=18672661

[Author]

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