Interfaces: PC and MAC and the screenGamma property...

[Martin Baxter]

>Alex Rice wrote
>
>On Jan 3, 2004, at 9:07 PM, Chipp Walters wrote:
>> As fine as Macs are for creating print and video, last I heard, they
>> only had a 3% marketshare for all computers. So, all those other
>> computers are viewing on 'non-Mac' gamma settings. I'm with Richard
>> and believe Apple should consider adopting the predominant gamma
>> standard. The first thing I did when getting the i-Book was reset the
>> gamma.
>
>I am not arguing with 97% making a de-facto standard. But I'm asking,
>if there is/was a good reason for the Mac's funky gamma, if it was born
>before the MS Windows PC gamma, and if it is a matter of principle that
>Mac's haven't switched to the predominant standard. I'm not a graphics
>professional- just curious.

Yes there is a reason for "Mac funky gamma", which is that it results in
colours on screen that closely reflect the actual image data ;-) - which is
not only a nicety but actually of great importance in the print industry
where colour mistakes have potential to be a serious and expensive issue.
The print industry is one where the mac has had an historical dominance.
Why would it benefit Apple to upset those customers? How many new customers
would it get if it adopted uncorrected gamma as standard? Might it actually
just end up with 2% market share instead?

Richard's (conceivably mischievous) opinion that Apple should discard gamma
correction seems to rest on the assumption that Mac Gamma is just a
perverse nuisance that confers no benefit. I think that in the print
industry at least it is perceived as a superior system to the 'oh who
really cares about colour accuracy?' 'system' that's usual in windows and
unix because that's 'good enough for the average office user or scientific
programmer'. The PC/unix gamma is just what you get with no gamma
correction at all, in other words the issue of display linearity is just
ignored by those platforms.

Back in the nineties I used to teach Photoshop. I recall one time a
PC-using student brought in an image he'd scanned at home and was shocked
to see how washed-out it looked on the Mac, saying it looked much darker on
his PC. He seemed to suspect that there was "something wrong" with the Mac.
So I showed him the histogram of the image, which turned out to contain no
information whatever below about 20% brightness. On his system however this
level had looked like black.

Surely interoperability can be achieved without abolishing biodiversity?
Isn't that supposed to be the intention of the Internet?
Just because the great majority of users don't know what screen-gamma is or
could care less, it does not follow that no manufacturer should offer a
system designed for those who do.

Let's not lose sight of the fact that the whole point of computers is
precisely that they are tools that may be adapted to individual and
minority requirements.

Martin