Intel HD Graphics 4000 and LG TV with Deep Color

Hello!

I'm a bit confused and I need someone to clarify some features for me. While looking at the Picture Settings in my LG UHD TV, I found that HDMI1 supports Deep Color 4:4:4 in YCbCr, so I enabled it. I have a tablet PC (tablet/laptop combo) Fujitsu Stylistic Q702 which has Intel HD 4000 graphics card. I connected the laptop to the TV with HDMI cable at HDMI1. I also changed the output from RGB to YCbCr. Windows still reports I have 8-bit per color channel and I found no way to enable 10-bit or 12-bit per color channel. Not from Windows Settings, not from Intel Graphics Properties. What exactly is "Deep Color"? I just have wider than sRGB color gamut, or it means I can also have 10-bit or 12-bit per color channel? If this is the case, how do I enable it with my hardware? Apparently the Intel driver allows only the standard 32-bit color at any resolution, including 1920x1080. Is there any Registry hack to enable richer color than that? Does my TV supports anything higher? I know it doesn't support HDR, but I don't think HDR and 10-bit or 12-bit must be enabled together! Hopefully I can enable 10-bit or 12-bit without enabling HDR. How?

Thank you in advance.

You are mixing few things , first of all back when the HDMI standards were primitive and bandwidth was low , a compression had to be made so signal may pass , they named types of compression standards 4:2:0 (very high) , 4:2:2 (mid) , 4:4:4 (no compression) , so if you have a 4K HDMI cable (1.4 & 2.x) you can certainly pass through raw uncompressed signal from your device hence "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) and no down sampling of any sort happens , this can be achieved with ease by your set of hardware and rest assured it is happening by default unless your cable is outdated .

Now on the other hand the 8 bit per pixel sampling was the standard ever since the beginning of coloring system but then as screens "Pixel Per Inch" (PPI) started advancing as now UHD TVs and 6K googles are facts people started complaining that they see gradient colors in stepping like forms and not as flowing as they should (Like for example a sunrise may appear as several arcs of different grades of orange) hence the need to raise the bit per color to allow a richer color pallet to solve that effect and hence the introduction of 10+ bit per pixel coloring with supporting videos that wouldn't show such step like gradients which was named HDR .

Now to note , this is a hardware aspect to display such pallets of coloring , GPUs capable of displaying it has that feature integrated in hardware , I do know that 4th generation of Intel graphics is pre the PPI & HDR upgrades , so while attempting to boost an old GPU to support higher resolutions is possible , a similar attempt to add support higher bit per pixel may not be as easy as there are few calls for these have to be done by hardware (acceleration) so it has to be supported by hardware first .

Now here is the catch , can such upgraded bits be emulated by software , the answer is yes , did any body attempt to do it , the answer is no , this is such a big project and display tycoons decided to use it as a matter of "Planned Obsolescence" and have no intentions of releasing drivers to emulate it , so if your hardware reads no support of HDR videos it probably won't .

P.S there is a hack I managed to achieve to remedy the fact of stepping gradient colors way before the introduction of HDR videos and that was to set video player to run as an Nvidia accelerated game on my laptop applying to which forced Anti-aliasing feature via Nvidia control panel and hence it fixes gradients but at the expense of slight blurriness that wouldn't be noticed except on low resolution , but sadly you do not happen to have an Nvidia GPU on that tablet or you have not mentioned .

LG's Deep Color is a setting to enable HDR (high dynamic range) color. That is 10 bits per RGB color (HDR10) or 12 bits (Dolby Vision).

I don't know whether the Intel HD 4000 supports HDR color. A quick web search gives a 2012 release date, so I'd guess no.

My nVidia RTX 2080 Super supports HDR, and it's connected to an LG LCD monitor (not a TV) which also supports it. I believe that the graphics card will not do HDR unless the monitor returns data that it's HDR compatible. I'm uisng a Display Port 1.4 connection. There is also a Settings switch that has to be turned on:



The switch isn't available unless both the graphics adapter and monitor support HDR.

Incidentally due to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth limitations, UHD (3840 X 2160) resolution at 60 fps and no chroma compression (4: 4: 4) is available only in 8 bit color (no HDR). The bit rate for that is 17.2 Gbps, and the limit for HDMI 2.0 is 18 Gbps. That requires a certfied premium HDMI 2.0 cable; an HDMI 1.4 "high speed" cable may not be adequate.

Well, I found a small utility called Custom Resolution Utility (CRU) that among others can read the EDID code from the monitor or TV and tweak it. I added 10-bit and 12-bit color support at my TV, but nothing changed. I believe Intel HD 4000 doesn't support anything higher than 8bpc. But it is good to know there is such a utility that can tweak stuff. It can also enable Freesync to a non-Freesync monitor, albeit it doesn't always work properly.