Color depths

One of the more heavily discussed and debated developments in recent video and game technology is the use of more color depth. The use of more color gives us prettier graphics because we get smoother transitions when seeing a gradient of colors. Additionally, having more colors allows certain effects to look better. An example would be colored lighting which diffuses outward.

16-bit gradient

Do you see how the 16-bit picture has a more noticeable change in the color gradient? You can kind of see how the colors are done in steps.

Before the 16-bit color that is popular nowadays, there was 256 color. By way of comparison, 16-bit can use up to 65,536 colors. Having that many more colors is obviously good for graphics. Taking it even further, there is 24-bit, or "true" color. 24-bit color is able to display an amazing ~16.7 million colors! This further adds realism to graphics, because more colors can be used. The drawback of 16-bit compared to 24 or 32-bit lies here - 24 and 32-bit have a much larger "palette" of colors. That is, the number of available colors is huge. With 16-bit, in order to achieve some of the color transitions and gradients, dithering must be used.

A strange problem with 16-bit is not in the number of available colors that it has, although more colors is generally better, but because when we assign color values to a pixel, we use the colors red, green, and blue (RGB) in different blends to get all sorts of colors. Now, knowing that we use 3 colors, and each bit in 16-bit is given a value for the pixel, we see that the number 16, as in 16 bits, is not divisible cleanly by 3, which are the 3 colors in RGB! So in current technology, we assign 5 bits to the Red value, 6 bits to the Green value, and 5 bits to the Blue value.

The 32-bit color sample picture is much smoother than the 16-bit one was, because the there are more colors to draw from to do smoother transitions across the color gradient:

32-bit gradient