Maximum amount of colours that can be displayed?

[Energize]

What is the maximum amount of colours that any display supports? I always thought 16.7million was the top but I read on the samsung website that their lcd displays can support upto 3.2 billion colours.

 

[Hamish]

are you sure it wasnt 32bit that it said? The human eye can only see around 24million colours so I wouldnt really be bothered about the extra 3.1billion extra colours

 

[Energize]

No it said something about changing the picture to 1024 steps from 256 to make 3.2 billion colours.

 

[Phil2008]

my lcd only supports 16 million colours, but you can still tell the differnce beteen 16bit and 32 bit colour when watching something on windows media player

 

[|Ric|]

you can tell the difference between 16bit and 24bit I assume, I doubt there is any difference with alpha

 

[Baddass]

well modern TFT displays can support 16.7 million (8 bit colour depth) from PVA, MVA and IPS panels. TN Film can only really produce 256k colours, but use dithering to show a 16.2 million colour depth (6 bit) which is a way to trick the eye into seeing intermediate colours as it switchs between two like colours. Some new models like the Eizo S2110W are even listed as 14 bit which is 4398 billion colours!! not sure really if there is any recognisable difference between 16.2, 16.7 or 4398 billion colours when it comes down to real use. Probably wouldnt matter unless you're a hard core graphics / photo professional

 

[Jimbo Mahoney]

...16.7 million (8 bit colour depth)
16.2 million colour depth (6 bit)
14 bit which is 4398 billion colours!!

8 bit = 256 colours
16 bit = 65,536 colours
24 bit = 16.7 million
32bit = 4295 million colours

unless you're listing some other method of bit depth?

EDIT - Ah, 8 bit per channel, sorry, I'm used to dealing with high bit depth monochrome cameras...

 

[Baddass]

yeah sorry, normally TFT's are referred to as 6 bit or 8 bit, im stuck in my ways