Kabateck Brown Kellner vs Apple: iMac Color Lawsuit

An iMac owner sued Apple Inc. Monday claiming the 20-inch iMac desktop computers can’t display the “millions of colors” Apple promises in promotional materials. The plaintiff Chandra Sanders, resident of Texas, is seeking class-action status for the lawsuit.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

“Beneath Apple’s ‘good guy’ image is a corporation that takes advantage of its customers… Apple is squeezing more profits for itself by using cheap screens and its customers are unwittingly paying the price,” Kabateck Brown Kellner law firm alleges in a press release.

Although the 20-inch monitors are incapable of displaying “millions of colors,” as claimed by Apple, the Cupertino-based company touts that ability on its Web site and other marketing material even though it knows iMac monitors can display only 262,144 true colors. According to the lawsuit:

Users are fooled into seeing many more colors because the monitors use technological tricks that involve showing many similar shades at high speeds to create the illusion of the desired shade… Those techniques can cause ‘crippling’ problems for people editing pictures and videos because the colors don’t always appear entirely smooth.

Kabateck Brown Kellner law firm alleges the monitor is “vastly inferior to the previous generation it replaced”, not that you would know it from Apple’s “grossly inflated” claims:

…The inferior technology of the 20-inch iMac is particularly ill-suited to editing photographs because of the display’s limited color potential and the distorting effect of the color simulation processes.

Apple said it doesn’t comment on pending litigation.