The 8-bit and 16-bit color modes are usually used to describe the color depth of an image in "bits", i.e., the number of bits in each color channel. The main difference between the two is the amount of color and detail. Color depth, also known as bit depth or number of color bits, determines how many colors can be displayed per pixel.
Number of colors:
8bit: When each color of red (R), green (G), and blue (B) is represented using one byte (8bit), each image can have 16.7 million colors, and 8bit works out to 16.7M.
16bit: When each color is represented using two bytes (16 bit), each image can have 65536 colors. 16 bit provides a larger color range, making the image more capable of displaying rich colors and details, and the display is able to show more colors and grayscale levels.
Gray level:
8bit: In the case of a grayscale image, each pixel is represented by one byte (8bit), and an image can have 256 levels of grayscale.
16bit: Each pixel is represented by two bytes (16bit) and an image can have 65536 levels of gray.
Color 16.7M
The display generally use binary to represent the color. 16-bit color is the total number of colors is 65536 colors, that is, 2 to the 16th power; 24-bit color is known as "true color", which can reach the limit of the human eye to distinguish, the number of colors is more than 16.77 million colors, that is, 2 to the 24th power. Color 16.7M means that it supports displaying the maximum number of colors of 16.7 million, i.e. it can display 16.7 million different colors. "M" is the meaning of million, is the abbreviation of English million. 16.7M = 16.7 million = 16.7 million.
The "color depth" of a display can be thought of as a color palette that determines how many colors are supported by each pixel on the screen. Since each pixel in the display is composed of three basic colors, red, green and blue, and the brightness of the pixel is also controlled by them (e.g., when all three colors are at their maximum, it will be white), the color depth can usually be set to 4bit, 8bit, 16bit, 24bit. the higher the number of bits in the color depth, the more colors there are, and the colors displayed on the screen will be more lifelike. However, when the color depth increases, it also increases the amount of data to be processed by the graphics accelerator card.
Color depth is usually used to illustrate the ability of colors. It and the digitization process has a close relationship with the number of small quantization, so the color depth is basically expressed by the quantization number bit. the larger the number of bits, the greater the number of colors that can be displayed per pixel, the richer the color, the more realistic the image, the file is also larger. For example: BMP format, support for red, green, blue each 256 kinds, different combinations of red, green and blue can constitute 256 of the three times the color, you need three 8-bit binary number, a total of 24 bits. So the color depth is 24.
The higher the resolution of the screen in the same size, the clearer the display, if the same size of the screen resolution is low, even if the display of 16 million colors is not as good as the high resolution of 260,000 good. For example: the same size2.4-inch TFT LCD liquid crystal displayof 240×320 resolution, then 16 million colors are better than 260,000 and 65,000 colors.
If a picture supports 256 colors (such as GIF format), then you need 256 different values to represent the different colors, that is, from 0 to 255, expressed in binary from 00000000 to 11111111, a total of 8 binary digits. So the color depth is 8. If the BMP format, it can support up to 256 kinds of red, green, blue, different combinations of red, green and blue can constitute 256 kinds of colors to the third power, you need three 8-bit binary number, a total of 24 bits. So the color depth is 24. There is also the PNG format, this format in addition to supporting 24-bit color, but also supports the alpha channel (that is, to control the transparency of the use of), a total of 32 bits. The greater the color depth, the more space the image takes up.
A color is often achieved through the RGB (red, blue and green) three primary colors to reconcile, so the color should have three primary color channels, if each channel is 8bit color depth, then the final display of the color after the permutation should be (2^8)^3, about 16.77 million colors, the same can be obtained from the color capacity of the 10bit color depth screen is 1.07 billion colors. 10bit for some people is completely necessary, streaming media resources are also difficult to support 10bit display, such as professional photographers in the post-processing, you can use 10bit display to deal with the picture, after zooming and other operations, you can get a better color transition effect. So focus on the refresh rate, sampling rate, color gamut, color accuracy and other parameters in order to reflect the better performance of the display.
