Bits per pixel
<hardware, graphics> (bpp) The number of bits of information stored per
pixel of an
image or displayed by a
graphics adapter.
The more bits there are, the more colours can be represented, but the more memory is required to store or display the image.
A colour can be described by the intensities of red, green and blue (
RGB) components.
Allowing 8 bits (1
byte) per component (24 bits per pixel) gives 256 levels for each component and over 16 million different colours - more than the human eye can distinguish.
Microsoft Windows [and others?] calls this truecolour.
An image of 1024x768 with 24 bpp requires over 2 MB of memory.
"High colour" uses 16 bpp (or 15 bpp), 5 bits for blue, 5 bits for red and 6 bits for green.
This reduced colour precision gives a slight loss of image quality at a 1/3 saving on memory.
Standard
VGA uses a
palette of 16 colours (4 bpp), each colour in the palette is 24 bit.
Standard
SVGA uses a
palette of 256 colours (8 bpp).
Some graphics hardware and software support 32-bit colour depths, including an 8-bit "alpha channel" for transparency effects.
