Depth by George Hernandez

The depth of color refers to the number of colors in an image or a screen. The depth of an image is usually measured in colors contained by the image. The depth of a screen is usually measured in bpp (bits per pixel) or cpp (colors per pixel).

Here are various color depths for reference:

A black and white image obviously only has two colors.
The human eye can see about 60,000 different colors.
The CMYK process can produce about 4,000 colors.
Monitors can display one to 24 bits of color.

Bits per Pixel	Colors per Pixel	Comments
0	2^0 = 1	Your monitor is off.
1	2^1 = 2	"Monochrome". Sufficient for black and white line art or halftones.
2	2^2 = 4	Sufficient for most grayscale images.
3	2^3 = 8
4	2^4 = 16
5	2^5 = 32
6	2^6 = 64
7	2^7 = 128
8	2^8 = 256	Used in VGA. Also sufficient for most grayscale images.
16	2^16 = 65,536	"High Color"
24	2^24 = 16,777,216	"True Color". Actually stored as 32 bpp, but 8 bits are unused.

Page Modified: (Hand noted: 2007-10-21 13:48:41Z) (Auto noted: 2007-11-17 06:27:37Z)