Re: 24-bit-per-pixel limit to Gdk RGB ?

[Peter Finderup Lund <firefly diku dk>]

On Tue, 18 Feb 2003, individual wrote:

> That's interesting. I was always under the imprsesion that we have left
> 24bpp displays far behind. Here's what my system says:

Nope.  Sometimes the extra byte is used for an alpha channel -- the rest
of the time it's wasted.  It's a speed/size tradeoff.  By aligning the
reads/writes they have this habit of going faster on modern machines.

> Eek.... I was hoping for greater bit depth, but I'm getting more and
> more convinced that it's pointless to try and render a 48 bpp image at
> 48 bpp screen depth when screens are at most 24bpp deep.

If you really want to, you can still do the necessary dithering yourself.

Very few monitors are of high enough quality that it matters, though.
(you will at most gain a few extra perceived bits in colour depth - you
will definitely not double them)

On printed material the situation would be very different.

-Peter

"Of course, I'm not unbiased, but in my humble opinion, I've
 gotten close to something that I can be really proud of."
 -- Knuth on The Art of Computer Programming.