CompuServe Messages

>> The 16 million figure is somewhat pointless as you would need a monitor with a 4,096×4096 resolution in order to show all of them. << I appreciate your thorough description, Gus, but I find the above bit of reasoning illogical. The necessity for 16M colors has nothing to do with showing them all at once. Rather, it has to do with how the colors interact. For example, fill a 640×480 screen with a pure red graduation of color. Since red is a primary color, the combinations available for the remaining two primaries are irrelavant. If there are not enough references to the intensities of red, banding will be apparent. Hence, without enough references for individual values of each primary color, banding will be noticeable (excepting dithering). Add any other primary as a constant accross the entire gradation and still, without enough references to the primary forming the graduation, banding will still be evident. For most of us, 256 graduations for a given hue or primary are about all we can see. It just so happens that having 256 colors for each primary produces a result of 16M colors — whether we need them all at once or not. Being mathematically oriented as I am, I argued this point with an art instructor over the course of a semester. He maintained that 65K colors are sufficient for photographic quality because you could never fit 16M colors on a screen. I asked "Why, then, do 24 bit images look so much cleaner?" and offered my above reasoning as the answer. Neither of us ever yielded to the other's point of view. Oh, well. Anyway, thanks a 'million' for efforts on this BXP. It is a usefull tool and that is what really counts! — James — MAP —