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6bit vs 8bit

M

Mojo

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 28, 2003
Messages
1,569
Just a quick question.

I've been told the BENQ FP931 and FP757 LCDs among others use a 6bit panel. This produces only 256k colors instead of 16million. Does this really matter where I'm just a regular user and not a web designer or graphic artist? Or will it look significantly different than my 17" CRT? What settings could I use on my CRT to get a feel for what the LCD would look like (if that's possible, ie: 256k colors or what?)?.

Also I was wondering if the new FP937 19" BENQ LCD is still 6 bit or is it 8bit?
 
Go check out some of the old [H] articles on 16 bit vs. 32 bit color in gaming. It was a big issue at one point, and really the beginning of image quality comparisons between video cards. Some cards only did 16 bit color. Some cards did both but were very slow at 32 bit. It was an interesting tradeoff of looks and speed, kind of like anti aliasing is now.

The monitor 6 bit/8 bit thing is somewhat misleading. I believe that's per subpixel, with three subpixels (red, green, blue) per pixel. So really, you're talking about 6+6+6=18 bits per pixel vs. 8+8+8=24 bits per pixel. The reason we're below 32bpp is because 24 and 32 bit color are roughly the same, but 32 bit uses the extra 8 bits as an alpha channel for transparency. 18 bit color is still going to be better than 16 bit color, so if you find the banding and so forth you see in the old review images to be not a deal-breaker, you should be able to live with a "6 bit" LCD. To simulate on your CRT, just tell your games or desktop to run at 16 bit color, if they have that option.
 
So 16 bit color can't do transparent icons? Like on a desktop?
 
It can, but I believe it has to be done differently.

The math for transparency is actually kind of cool. Red, green, and blue are each represented by a number 0 to 255 (this takes 8 bits, giving the 8+8+8 = 24 bits per pixel). So you could say that the color of one pixel might be 119,208,74. Now you want to overlay another another pixel which is 221,84,131 (obviously you are making a whole object transparent, but it's done per pixel and once you understand how, you just repeat it for each pixel in the object). You decide on the amount of transparency, say 60%. That means you want to see the background at 60% and overlay at 40%. The trick for this is that you take the color value of your background pixel, multiply by .6 for 60%, then take your overlay pixel, multiply that by .4 for 40%, then add the resulting values together. So in this example you take the two reds and do this, 119(.6)+221(.4) = 160, which is an "average" weighted appropriately between the two values to get the transparency you want. You do the same thing for the greens and blues, then repeat for every pixel. Easy!

I'll admit I don't exactly know how the extra 8 bits in 32 bit color are used for transparency, maybe I'll go look it up :)
 
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