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 called 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 counts as 16.7M.
16bit: When each color is represented by two bytes (16bit), each image can have 65,536 colors. 16bit provides a larger range of colors, making the image more capable of displaying rich colors and details, and the display is able to show more colors and grayscale levels.
Grayscale levels:
8 bit: If it is a grayscale image, each pixel is represented by one byte (8bit), an image can have 256 levels of grayscale.
16 bit: Each pixel is represented by two bytes (16bit), and an image can have 65536 levels of gray.
Color 16.7M
The display generally uses binary to represent the color. 16-bit color 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, 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 M.
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 4 bit, 8 bit, 16 bit, 24 bit. 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 capability of colors. It is closely related to the small quantization number of the digitization process, 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, and the larger the file. 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, it needs 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 size 2.4 inch TFT LCD display 240 × 320 resolution, then 16 million colors is better than 260,000 colors and 65,000 colors.
A color is often achieved through the RGB (red, blue and green) three primary colors, so the color should have three primary color channels, if each channel is 8bit color depth, then the final display of the color through the combination of the arrangement 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.
