Investigate Bit Depth – sampling, bits per pixel (BPP), monochrome, 256, high colour, true colour.

What is it?

Bit Depth- how many colours (number of bits used to represent the colours) are used in a bit mapped image. The number of bits is the number of 0’s and 1’s used in each colour on the image.

Bits per Pixel (BPP) – sum of the bits in all 3 colour channels (represents the total number of colours available at each pixel).

Bits per Channel- the bit depth for each primary colour

Monochrome- is different shades of the same colour or different shades of black and white

256- 256 is the number of different values for each primary colour when a camera has an 8 bit per channel quality. This means that it can use 8 different combinations of 0’s and 1’s. 256 comes from the calculation of 2⁸ or 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2. This value represents just the one primary colour value at each pixel. When all three primary colours are calculated at a pixel the number of colours available is 16,777,216. This is known as 24 bits per pixel as it is made up of three 8-bit colour channels.

Example of use:

Bits Per Pixel	Number of Colors Available	Common Name(s)
1	2	Monochrome
2	4	CGA
4	16	EGA
8	256	VGA
16	65536	XGA, High Color
24	16777216	SVGA, True Color
32	16777216 + Transparency
48	281 Trillion