The Microsoft Surface Studio Review

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• warrenk81 - Friday, January 20, 2017 - link

  what does this sentence mean? "It would be great to see backlighting as well, but that is also not missing."
  
  Does it have lights or not?

• Ryan Smith - Friday, January 20, 2017 - link

  One too many negations, it seems. Let's try this: "It would be great to see backlighting on this keyboard as well, but that is also absent"

• melgross - Friday, January 20, 2017 - link

  About the review. There are a number of errors in areas in which the reviewer doesn't seem to understand,
  
  D65 is NOT daylight, the concept of what daylight is is very complex. For many decades, daylight has been standardized as 5.6K, not 6.5K. The reason why D65 was invented wasn't to simulate daylight, but because of practical graphics standards reasoning.
  
  D5 has been the graphics standard going back a very long time. Every light box used for color was D5. So were print view boxes and such. The problem was that in the beginning days of computers entering the graphics space, a problem came up.
  
  While my Barco monitors, in my place, that cost $16,000, could reach D5 calibration, no other could. The problem was that the monitors couldn't be made to display enough brightness. As a result, calibrating to D5 left us with a fairly dim, and very yellow screen. Since the red and green couldn't be brought up enough, the blue needed to be turned down, leaving that horrible screen. The barco was the only monitor that had enough brightness.
  
  So there was much discussion, and as a result, D65 was decided upon as a compromise. It could easily be calibrated to using most high quality graphics monitors, and so that became the standard.
  
  Now, we thing of D65 as daylight, but it isn't. Daylight varies from about D22 to about D20.0 in other words, about 2.2K to about 20K. Where you are in the world, at any given time of the day, or year, will determine what that point is, and it doesn't average D65.
  
  It's why when a photo is taken with sunlight and open shade, the sun portion is very yellow, and the shade is mostly cyan.
  
  This may seem to be a little point to make, but I see people misunderstanding this so often, it's frustrating. I ran a large commercial photo lab in NYC for many years, and we were one of the first to begin to go digital in 1988.
  
  By the way, Windows has never had effective color management. Individual developers such as Adobe have had to write their own management software, which isn't usable systemwide. That means that if you have anything other than an image that is using the sRGB gamut, it won't be correct except when running in a color managed app.
  
  Windows 10 is the first Windows OS to have a working color management system built-in, but it comes turned off, because turning it on at this late stage screws up everything else in Windows, and it's very buggy. Maybe someday, that will change. But for now, you can't view two images with differing gamuts side by side in Windows. Only one will ever show correctly.
  
  This is one reason doing commercial color work on this will be a major headache.

• Brandon Chester - Friday, January 20, 2017 - link

  All CIE standard illuminants from series D are designed to simulate daylight. I believe by D5 you mean D50, which has a lower CCT than D65. The review is not incorrect in describing D65 as representing daylight. In fact, the actual spec states that D65 should be used for all colorimetric calculations requiring a value to represent daylight. I encourage you to read ISO 11664-2.
  
  You are correct on companies having to roll their own color management. However, Windows 10 still uses WCS, it is just as unusable as before, and neither Win32 nor UWP integrate it at all, so there is not some working CMM that is just turned off. This is why brand new UWP apps like Photos and Microsoft Edge still aren't color managed, which would be implicit in a system where the underlying graphics framework is color managed and thus any component that uses it for drawing is color managed.

• melgross - Friday, January 20, 2017 - link

  Yes, D50, but, hese color spaces do not actually represent daylight. They represent a convenient compromise that allows equipment to be made and maintained, while giving some "sort" of recognizable color while point.
  
  This is why the concept of daylight has varied so much over time. I know ISO 11664-2, because I was one of those who was consulted on this standard way back then. As I say, all of these various standards are mechanical approximations of something natural.
  
  So, for example, what is a proper white point? Well, we really don't know. Should it be represented by something that supposedly looks something like "natural" light, whatever that is? Should it be represented by our own eye/brain combination which is most sensitive to yellow/green?
  
  So when you look at the sky, it's about 20K. But that's not what's always reflected off an object, which could be closer to 3K, which is what we're looking at, and what our brain recognizes as "correct", with its ability to adjust its perception to various light sources.
  
  I've undergone many permutations of these questions over the decades. And it will change again.
  
  I did say that WCS is so buggy that it's still turned off. But that's not the only reason. Microsoft's customers don't care about color management in a large enough percentage for Microsoft to really care. They only added this, years ago, to satisfy those screaming for it, but without bothering to really work on it. Enough said, they think, that it's there.
  
  You basically said what I did, it with more explanation. Yeah, it's always been a mess, and it's not likely to be fixed anytime soon. Android, by the way, has no color management whatsoever, and isn't likely to get any, which is why wide band screens on Android products are almost useless.

• id4andrei - Friday, January 20, 2017 - link

  I'm curious, in the case of something like a Samsung Galaxy phone, when you select the supposedly exceptionally accurate "basic" profile is that not akin to switching colorspaces on the Studio? I mean Samsung does not use pure Android which as you said is completely inept at color management, but a modified and skinned Android that might have some rudimentary color management. Is it not?

• Brett Howse - Friday, January 20, 2017 - link

  How do I put this. If there was color management, it wouldn't matter what gamut the display was able to use, since the colors would be transformed to fit that color space, assuming the display color space covers both. So, as an example, if you were viewing a sRGB photo on a P3 D65 display, the colors would be correct because there is color management, and it knows the photo is sRGB, and it knows the display is P3 D65, so it can use some math to put the sRGB photo into the correct P3 D65 space.
  
  If you don't have color management, and something is 85% red in sRGB, but your display is P3 D65, it will appear as 85% of the larger space, and would be oversaturated.
  
  We should really have Brandon write up a piece on this outside of the few times he's addressed it.
  
  Some Windows apps do have color management, and some respect the color management in Windows, but most do not. For instance the old Photo Viewer does work, but the new UWP Photos app has no color management. Apps like Adobe Photoshop have written their own color management, so they generally work well.

• id4andrei - Saturday, January 21, 2017 - link

  Aha so viewing a random sRGB picture on your presumably AdobeRGB Android smartphone would look waaaay off. While an AdobeRGB picture would look right.

• Brett Howse - Saturday, January 21, 2017 - link

  Exactly, and that's the case on Android. iOS has color management, so the P3 D65 displays they've started using don't suffer from this issue.

• Icehawk - Sunday, January 22, 2017 - link

  I bet this is why colors were off viewing a file in the new Photo app (like way off) but using the old Photo Viewer it looked right.