How do Hue Bulbs do millions of different colors, what sorcery is this?

cheese_greater@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 48 points –
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that's how.

one of the 3 LEDs can have 256 levels of brightness (off included)

take that to the power of three, and you have 16 million colours.

but no mortal can actually tell the difference between 255, 255, 255 and 255, 254, 255.

but no mortal can actually tell the difference between 255, 255, 255 and 255, 254, 255.

Maybe YOU can't, but don't speak for the rest of us 😤

Next you're going to tell me the human eye is capable of differentiating fps above 30

Nah, that's crazy, it only goes up to a crispy 24 fps. Everyone knows that.

Yeah, essentially the same sourcery behind every pixel of any modern display. The bulb is one pixel.

So... Wait... Does this mean thousands of Hue bulbs can be a display screen? Has this been done?

those really huge displays are often millions of individual RGB LEDs. it would just be a software nightmare to do with hue bulbs.

If they were hardwired yes, but zigbee with millions of bulbs?

I'm guessing you'd hit interference at some point.

But also latency would be bad and you almost definitely couldn't synchronize them well.

Yeah, I've done something similar with ~120 wifi bulbs for a light show that responded to music and that worked fairly well but I doubt it would have worked with more than a few hundred.

Yeah, fair point. It would be no good to have each pixel of an enormous display doing its own processing, and trying to wirelessly command that many lights at once doesn't seem possible at all.

Was going to say "what a high quality answer", then I saw you have twice the votes the post has. Well deserved.

And a 4K TV with 10-bit HDR support can show

(2^10 )^3 × 3840 × 2160 = 8,906,044,184,985,600

different images.