Monitor display with more than 256 shades of gray

Question

Today, display monitors have an 8-bit channel or 24-bit color, and most of them work in sRGB color mode. A graphical interface and a graphical library such as Qt and X work within these limits. for example, you can create a QImage from an array of unsigned chars (8 bits per channel), but no more.

So what happens to these high-end monitors that offer, say, 1024 shades of gray? Qt does not offer a 30-bit color mode, nor X. How do I use all the bits per channel?

Answer 1

Use OpenGL. Documents from AMD and Nvidia .

In a Qt application, I assume (have not tried it), it should be possible for it to get a high bit depth area for the application by creating a QGLWidget with QGLFormat appropriately configured (set bit depths using setRedBufferSize, etc.). Please note that things like QPainter work very well on QGLWidget, so there is no need to transfer all your Qt code to OpenGL calls, only bits that you really want to get extra accuracy on. The limited formats supported by QImage are certainly a bit weak.

Answer 2

Complementary colors are used even if you cannot directly control them through your DVI connection. Ever heard of color calibration?

Only very few specialized solutions allow direct control of 30-bit color. (Although it is becoming more popular with DisplayPort)