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Originally Posted by R K
Unless I'm missing something, 320 x 240 = 76,800 pixels, so anything above 65,536 colors is only going to benefit the remaining 11,264 pixels, which is only a 15% increase in color depth.
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Those two numbers really have nothing to do with each other, it's mere happenstance that they're close to each other.
The color depth refers to the number of colors each pixel can display. Going back to good old CRT days, each color is represented by a specific ratio and intensity of red, green, and blue. The most advanced consumer screen today can display 256 levels of green, 256 levels of red, and 256 levels of blue per pixel. That's 2^8 for each color, so 2^8*2^8*2^8 total combinations. 2^24 = about 16.7 million possible color combinations per pixel. The total number of color combinations for a 240x320 screen with 24 bit color is well over 1 trillion, as each pixel has 16,777,216 combinations. With 16 bit color, that's only 5 billion combinations.
Going from 2 colors to 4 colors is a huge difference. From 16 to 256 is a huge difference. From 256 to 65k colors is a huge difference. Trouble is, from 65k to 16.7 million colors isn't a big difference. It's only noticeable with many slightly-varied similarly colored shades in proximityt to each other. With 16 bit color, you'll notice when colors are clustered together instead of smoothly transitioning from one to the next (banding), easily observable in gradients. But that's about it. If you look at a well-composed color photograph without gradients, 16bit and 24bit color would look nearly identical. Banding isn't noticable in many many situations. And the article linked goes into detail about why taking that additional step from 16bit to 24bit color isn't very memory-efficient, and therefore not worth it.
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Originally Posted by Darius Wey
Modern LCD screens, however, are capable of showing four times that many (262144).
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Originally Posted by saru83
so basically what i wanna say is that SAMSUNG has released a 16.7 Million colour screen cell phone which is the FULL 24 bit thing...
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What Darius was saying was that
most screens released show 262k colors. I'm sure you'll find that the screen on Samsung's phone isn't used in very many devices. There are tradeoffs in brightness, battery life, and, most importantly, cost to the manufacturer. They need to keep brightness and battery life up while keeping cost down. Problem is, more of the former leads to more of the latter, and the same can be said with color. And more colors means more memory, as the article illustrates.
Do I want a 24 bit display? Yes. Do I want to pay for it? No. Could I notice a difference? Exceedingly easily.
Would I notice a difference? Not in casual use. Would I want the performance dip associated with it? Nope.