Re: 8 verses 16 bit

[Hersch Nitikman <hersch@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Let's accept that a healthy human eye, and the brain that processes its 
input are capable of distinguishing more shades than 8bitsx3colors can 
produce. There are essentially 2 classes of viewing systems for our images:
Transmitted light, a good example being a good monitor of some kind.
A print, reflecting the image in the presence of illumination.
To the best of my understanding, neither a color print, (whether chemical 
or inkjet) nor a monitor, whether CRT or LCD (or plasma display) have a 
gamut that exceeds the 8-bit image. If this is so, then the best/only(?) 
reason for going to 16 bits per primary color is to have spare pixels to 
maintain the quality of the image through the editing/optimization process, 
before dropping down to 8 bits for display. Am I wrong in this? If so, I'm 
sure I'm not the only one who'd like to know wherein.
Hersch

At 10:07 PM 03/02/2002 -0800, you wrote:
>on 3/2/02 8:38, David Chien at chiendh@uci.edu wrote:
>
> > Basically, the more bits you have, the more colors you can reproduce or
> > use within your files.
> >
> > Because bits refer to the binary bits used in a computer, you can
> > calculate the number of colors you have total under each system.
> >
> > eg. 8 bits = 2^8 (2 raised to the power of 8) = 256 shades per color
> > R, G, B (red, green, blue, the three colors used in emmissive display
> > systems to create all other colors).
> >
> > 256*256*256 (rgb) = 16 million colors
> >
> > 16 bits = 2^16 = 65536 shades per R, G, B color
> >
> > 65536^3 (rgb) = 281 trillion colors
>
><-snip->
>
>David,
>
>Thank you for a lucid, straightforward answer... really!
>
>I also want to say thanks for not going into a verses versus versus thing.
>
>Kind regards,
>
>   ~John
>
>-
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