Color accuracy isn't so much color resolution. That's like the difference between precision and accuracy, you can have something accurate with poor precision, and vice versa.

When dealing with digital content, isn't accuracy what you're looking for? Properly calibrating a display would take care of the precision.

(Unless I'm confused here, which is entirely possible.)

Situations when you need all 8 bits of color resolution:

-- performing color matching against a sample - fabric, print, etc -- soft-proofing for print output (spot colors) -- when performing any color/contrast adjustments on photographs or art that have fine color/value gradients. A common example is a grey sweep backdrop--zoom in past a certain point and you can see visible banding

That said, anyone doing prepress on a laptop is stupid. Get thee to a color booth and a 10-bit LUT Eizo (or even better to your cache of discontinued Sony Artisans you keep in a closet somewhere and replace as they age).

I think the main problem is the visual artifacts introduced by the time-domain dithering done to compensate for the 6-bit DACs, rather than the lack of color resolution itself. This affects everyone, not just artists foolish enough to use laptops.

The fact that, to a first approximation, one can no longer buy a laptop with an LCD of the same quality as those made 10 years ago - at any price - is disturbing all in itself, and suggests that technology is marching backwards. What's next, the abolition of 44.1KHz audio?

Compare a 1980s keyboard to a modern one. It is entirely conceivable that the UI technology we will be using in a decade or two will be of such abominable quality that one might be ashamed to design it into a children's toy computer today.

|What's next, the abolition of 44.1KHz audio?

Actually, it's funny that you pose that question in this article. I think MP3s are a great example of "44.1KHz" audio that is not the fidelity of what you're probably thinking of, the CD-Audio standard.

People are clearly prioritizing things other than the sheer quality of the material, be it visual or audio. I think it's impressive that the LCD folks have been able to engineer LCDs at the prices they have. And, much like MP3s shrunk music file sizes by throwing away parts of the music that people aren't supposed to miss, the LCD guys are throwing away quality that, apparently, people don't care about either.

> the LCD guys are throwing away quality that, apparently, people don't care about either.

The problem is that a substantial minority does care about quality - and we are left out in the cold. Have you ever priced a "specialist" monitor? That is where all non-lowest-common-denominator user interface technology seems to be headed - squarely outside the budget of the individual. And as we can see from the article, it has become entirely impossible to purchase a new laptop with both a decent screen and a decent operating system.

It is a trend in everything that surrounds us - cars, fridges, clothes, shoes, buildings - everything is made cheaper. Compare computer case from 1990 and now - modern economy class cases are ultra light. Reason is simple - market doesn't care about 8 or 10 or 12 bit displays, so they are not offered. Cost to the company to introduce them far overweights benefit of selling it to .01% of individuals who care. Or who think that they care.

Calibrating the display will give you accuracy, ie the colors match those in real life. It doesn't help with precision, which is how narrow the distribution is. (That said, we're not strictly talking about that here, since there's no randomness in the colors, just an inability to reproduce small enough changes.)

But I agree with the other comment, on a laptop I care more about things looking nice, ie no dither or banding, rather than about accurate color reproduction.