10 Bit Monitors

10 Bit, in the context of monitors, remains a vexed and often misunderstood issue, even in 2024.

We have a legacy article on this issue here - 10 Bit Output Support - which covered the basics of the issue back in the days when it was unusual/difficult to get reliable 10 bit colour support out of a computer, and image editing software working reliably with 10 bit colour.   That article was all about the signal coming out of computers (so that if you had a monitor with 10 bit input support, you could get a 10 bit colour path working).  A 10 bit colour path meant that colour calculations could be handled with far greater accuracy, resulting in a more accurate display.  The panel bit depth itself, a separate but related issue, was not part of this article.

As that article now says at the top, those days are pretty much behind us now (yay!) - modern operating systems and video cards, as well as image editing software like Photoshop and the like, all support 10 bit colour as a matter of course now.  It's even usually turned on by default, at this point!

That article only ever addressed the colour path of the signal from the computer to the monitor.  It (deliberately) never addressed a key related issue - the actual bit depth of the monitor panel itself.  In a nutshell, 8 bit monitors can natively display approximately 16 million different colours, whilst 10 bit monitors can theoretically natively display over a billion different colours (which is far more than the human eye can actually distinguish, in fact).

The older article didn't address panel bit depth because just about all panels, for a very long time (and this includes even high end models like the Eizo CG range) - were not, in fact, 'true' 10 bit panels.  Until recently, just about all high quality, colour accurate monitors used 8 bit panels.

Oddly, a few true 10 bit panels did exist - e.g. Dell and LG released a few claimed true 10 bit panel monitors over the years.  Some of this was just lies or the marketing department not really understanding properly, and those turned out to be 8 bit in reality, but a few were in fact true 10 bit panels.  However, despite being true 10 bit panels, these were awful monitors in other ways (gross uniformity issues, terrible colour adjustment systems rendering them useless as calibration etc etc) - so it really wasn't a relevant issue of any practical importance - all the best vaguely affordable colour '10 bit' accurate displays were, for the first two decades of this century, actually using a technology known as '8 bit plus FRC' to simulate 10 bit colour output.

In a nutshell FRC technology uses a blending type approach to produce the full 10 bit colour range by cycling colour tones so quickly (thousands of times per second) - that they blend together to visually form a new colour to your eye (for more see e.g. BenQ's explanation page). (Oddly, FRC stands for Frame Rate Control, which is in itself perhaps rather confusing - as to a lay person FRC makes one think about basic screen refresh rates like 24p vs 60p etc!).

Did this matter?  Honestly, no, not really.

A few internet keyboard warriors got very upset about this (as they do about everything!) - but the rest of us just got on with acknowledging reality and carried on our high-end work with colour, using 8-bit+FRC panels, because they offered the best overall colour performance and were, provably, very much up to the jobs they were asked to do. (I mean, if you felt it was better to buy a crappy Dell 'true 10 bit' with gross and obvious uniformity issues versus a lovely, uniform, accurate and reliable Eizo CG model - then good luck to you & happy travels!).

Sure, in the broadcast world (i.e. high end TV and film editing) - there were indeed better, true 10 bit monitors available. But if you had a budget of $30000 plus, then of course you can afford the luxury of true 10 bit. So editing suites usually had these things in place. But for more humble working professionals (i.e., the vast bulk of us) - such things were simply inaccessible in practise.

It didn't really matter, because 8 bit+FRC was (and is) a very very effective technology, in practise. Simulated 10 bit colour turns out to be very close in actual real world performance to true 10 but colour. Of course actual, true 10 bit is better, in theory. And, if indeed all other aspects of a monitor's quality are equal, then 10 bit is better in practise as well. But the reality was that highly colour accurate monitors simply didn't come with true 10 bit panels, until very recently. And even now, many excellent monitors are still using 8 bit+FRC because it is so effective, and helps keep monitors affordable.

(One note - FRC might (perhaps) be a more important issue for you if you're one of those rare people that extremely sensitive to technologies that use high speed changes for visual results (e.g. you're probably also sensitive to PWM brightness modulation) - if you're in doubt, please contact us to arrange an appointment to actually try these monitors out so you can be sure!).