Difference between 16bit and 32bit colour depth?

Question

16 bit is approximately 16 million colours and 32 bit is approximately 32 million colours, is this correct?

Also is it true in a 16bit picture there can be 256 shades of red, 256 shades of green, and 256 shades of blue (RGB)? Does that mean 32 bit would have something like 317 per RGB colour?

Answer 1

16 bit color is high color...32 bit color is true color...
16 bit color has 65,536 different colors...32 bit color has 16,777,216
16 bit color has 64 different shades of red, green, and blue
32 bit color has 256 different shades...

32 bit is better...

Answer 2

16 bit:
---------
6 bits green, 5 bits red, 5 bits blue

(Our eyes are more sensitive to green)

This allows a total of 2^16 colors to be represented. (65536 colors, not 16 million)

32bit:
---------
actually this is done due to computers using 4 bytes (=32bits) to handle color. The color itself is store in 3 bytes, resulting in 2^24 colors

The fourth byte is potentially used as an alpha channel, and strictly speaking not containing color. Alpha channels towards a display is nonsense and as such it's just leaving those 8 additional bits empty (an alpha channel is used to achieve transparency, but a screen is just one layer ...)

2^24 = 16 777 216 (about 16 million colors.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/32_bit_color

Answer 3

yes you are correct on all corners 32 bit has more pixels to it and there fore a better sharper , cripser more vivid image would appear on your screen

Think of like this a 16 bit pic would look like super mario brothers on the orginal eight bit Nintendo
or maybe galaga

most games today use 32bit
or else it wouldnt look too good

Hope this helps ,
J.D.

Answer 4

the second is more bright