now with guaranteed less than 100% color!
Here are some test pictures demonstrating several color depths as rendered on a 128x64 display in Qt using QImage. No dithering was used, though.
The colors are a rendering of the HSL color space. Wikipedia also has a list of monochrome and RGB palettes.
This is what you have on you computer. 8bit for every color and for alpha channel.
Compact form used for most displays that are driveable by a µC. FT8XX tops out with this. Almost as "good" as ARGB8. Green has 6bit, because eye has higher sensitivity for it.
Same as RGB565, but green only has 5bit and one bit alpha channel.
4 bit for every color and alpha. Not so great anymore.
3bit for red and green, only 2 for blue because eye is the least sensitive for blue. This looks terrible, but the upshot is that its only one byte per pixel.
2bit for every color and alpha. Better start running.
ROFLOL. 1bit for every color. GET TO THE CHOPPER!
8bits per pixel, but grayscale! This uses the following formula to map colors onto their perceived brightness:
Luminence: (0.2125 * red) + (0.7154 * green) + (0.0721 * blue)
4bits per pixel.
2bits per pixel. Hm, maybe not.
Lolnope. Needs dithering. NOW!
