Quote:
Originally Posted by ProfCrash
I thought that the ereaders today were 16 grey scale. The K1 was 8 grey scale.
|
They're talking about bits... how many 1s and 0s are used to represent each pixel's (dot) color. Though I think that somebody said bits when they meant shades.
When you say that a screen is an 8 bit display you mean that there are 8 0s and 1s representing its possible shades of gray (or color as the case may be), so:
00000000 --> 11111111
That's a LOT of possible values, 2^8 possible values actually, so 256 different values. A 256 bit screen would allow for 11579208923731619542357098500869000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000 [not really all zeros at the end, but the value far exceeds the precision of my calculator, and I put it in standard notation for those who don't know how to read exponent (scientific) notation] possible different colors, so whoever said that obviously didn't mean a 256 bit display.
For a bit more clarity:
1 bit = 0 or 1, so either white or black for each dot.
2 bit = 00, 01, 10, or 11, so four shades, white, black, and two intermediate shades per dot
3 bit = 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111, or 8 possible shades, white, black, and 6 intermediate shades, which is what most previous generation readers supported.
4 bit = 0000, 0001, 0010, 0011, 0100, 0101, 0110, 0111, 1000, 1001, 1010, 1011, 1100, 1101, 1110, 1111, so 16 possible values, white, black, and 14 intermediate shades, which is what most modern e-readers support.
Maybe I've strayed too far from the discussion, but I thought I'd help clarify for those who have always wondered what it meant to say "16 bit display", etc... (which your computer's graphics card [or the graphics hardware on your LCD based reader] does support, 16, 24, or even 32 bits per pixel, the details of which I won't go into here)