Talk:List of monochrome and RGB color formats

Dubious tag
I put a "dubious" tag, lacking a better idea, on a sentence that I couldn't understand. What is it trying to say? Dicklyon (talk) 02:09, 29 February 2008 (UTC)


 * The entire paragraph was a fossil; even it is not mine, but part of the primitive stub article (february 2007, which mixes and misleaded many concepts). As far I can remember, it was intended for something related to YUV to RGB accuracy or so. It was nonsense in the current article (obvious). This was my fault, sorry.


 * Well, actually you wasted a right opportunity to delete things! ;-) -Ricardo Cancho Niemietz (talk) 14:24, 29 February 2008 (UTC)


 * It means that the human eye is less sensitive to blue light and more sensitive to green light (see File:Luminosity.png). For this reason, a #FF0000 red color will look brighter than a #0000FF blue color but darker than a #00FF00 green color, and green and red have a higher weight in calculating the luminance than blue.  (I think it's clear enough, but maybe adding a reference helps understanding it; check candela for possible references.  Another option is to put a pic with 32 levels of R, G, and B (don't know if there's already one) to show how green bands appear sharp and blue ones blurry.)  —138.100.74.81 (talk) 15:29, 17 July 2013 (UTC)


 * No, the sentence referred to in my Feb. 2008 comment was "Also, the limitations of the display monitor capabilities gives different presentations regarding of the logic's method to produce the colors in some older systems." Dicklyon (talk) 15:33, 17 July 2013 (UTC)


 * The currently tagged sentence "The 3-3-2 bit RGB use 3 bits for each of the red and green color components, and 2 bits for the blue component, due to the lesser[dubious – discuss][citation needed] sensitivity of the normal human eye to this primary color" is still dubious. The lesser sensitivity to blue is not an obvious or sensible reason for using coarser quantization there.  The lower resolution for blue is more likely, but still dubious.  A reliable source that says why would be useful there.  Dicklyon (talk) 15:37, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Banding in 24bit samples
The section on 24-bit palettes have 4 sample images which it states "must be seen as continuous" and it suggests that if banding is visible, the display is running at 16-bit or less.

I have looked at the images from 2 different computers, both of them running at 24-bit, and on both of them the two first images (Red=0 and Red=85) have very clear banding, while the third (Red=170) have less obvious banding and the fourth (Red=255) has subtle banding.

I realise that the displays could be badly calibrated, and my knowledge of color and displays is very limited so I haven't made any edits, but for someone with my eyesight (which to the best of my knowledge is average at best) the claim that there is no banding is clearly false. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.116.246.5 (talk) 13:55, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Test image clarification
If the intent of the test images is to represent a collection of possible colors at each bit depth, then, at a minimum, the 15-bit image is incorrect.

It contains over a thousand colors (for example, #CED6FF) which are not representible with 15 bits.

If this is not the intent, could some explanation be added (to the images themselves, perhaps) as to how these images are representative samples of their respective palettes? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Joedavidson (talk • contribs) 14:37, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

4-bit RGBI palette incorrect
The example palette is a 4-bit RGBI palette, but it is not the CGA 4-bit palette. See Color Graphics Adaptor. The bright part of the palette are not pure colors and also instead of light yellow a brown color is used. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.116.207.246 (talk) 09:45, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
 * No, but it is the Windows 4-bit palette. --82.18.65.37 (talk) 00:02, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Atari 2-bit Greyscale
Around 1989 I saw an Atari computer that supported a high resolution monitor in monochrome and a medium resolution monitor in two modes, one of which was a 2-bit greyscale. There was even a Breakout-style game available that supported the high resolution monitor by dithering to obtain an intermediate grey (it only used three of the greyscale colours when played on a medium resolution monitor).

30bit RGB
Some graphics cards also support 30bit RGB, althought there are not many programs and OSes which support it. One example ist the ATI X1900. --MrBurns (talk) 20:56, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Why non-linear color value increases?
I've noticed that in all low-depth RGB and grayscale cases the increases in values of individual colors were non-linear for some reason. For example, the case of 6-bit RGB palette, the acceptable levels of individual colors when converted to 24-bit RGB are 0, 104, 183 and 255 when they should be 0, 85, 170, 255 (see Enhanced Graphics Adapter). This is also confirmed by the fact that on my own PC the 16-bit RGB test image looks differently in the 16- and 24-bit color modes. This also explains the "Test image clarification" issue above: the extra colors are there because of the wrongly chosen individual color values. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.114.236.123 (talk) 09:26, 14 March 2009 (UTC)


 * If the values were equally spaced, the intensities would be very nonlinearly spaced. The values shown in the table on the EGA page are equally spaced in 24-bit RGB, so it's not clear why you're asking.  It sounds like you've got different gamma corrections in your different color spaces.  Dicklyon (talk) 16:15, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

6×6×6 = 216 "web colors" are missing
Could anybody add this IMHO also quite important palette to the list, please? :-) --RokerHRO (talk) 10:38, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Another unrealistic palette article with no dithering
I find it hard to believe that a supposedly encyclopedic article discussing paletted colors of older computer systems would completely exclude examples of dithering from the article.

In the old days when display capabilities were limited, dithering was heavily used to overcome the inherent technical limits of the hardware. The early Macintosh used dithering for all photo-realistic images such as in HyperCard.

Is the original article author just trying to exemplify the limits of the technology at the time, and how much more awesome things are now by comparison?

To exclude dithered examples makes this article either a half-truth of how things really were, or mostly irrelevant.

DMahalko (talk) 02:44, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

LCD Screen
I think it's worth mentioning that 18 bits is the most colours an LCD screen could produce, up until quite recently. It was a limitation of LCD manufacturing. Many laptops had 24-bit graphics with an 18-bit screen, ignoring the 6 least significant bits to keep things simple, though when plugged into a CRT monitor you got the full 24 bits. 188.29.164.99 (talk) 12:53, 3 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I added "Used internally by many LCD monitors" in the 18-bit RGB section. --MrBurns (talk) 02:39, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

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9-bit RGB
Why the red value for 9-bit RGB in steps should be: #000000 or rgb(0, 0, 0), #240000 or rgb(36, 0, 0) , #490000 or rgb(73, 0, 0) , #6D0000 or rgb(109, 0, 0) , #920000 or rgb(146, 0, 0) , #B60000 or rgb(182, 0, 0) , #DB0000 or rgb(219, 0, 0) , and #FF0000 or rgb(255, 0, 0) , for your example.


 * This is incomprehensible, but I'd like to think this was supposed to bring up the fact that the red values are inconsistent, only being approximately so. I didn't bother checking out much else upon noticing that there are duplicate colors in the palette for 9-bit. I brought it up on the image page itself, but I'll link the image here too. 2600:1702:18F0:5180:D0E:2D13:2459:165C (talk) 15:54, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

Wrong terminlogy all over?
These are not palettes at all. These are color spaces. A color palette is an associative array in which a full representation of a color is assigned an index by which it can be referred to, allowing for pixels to have their color assigned with less information than the one needed to define a color in full. Here is a clear example of the CGA color palette, citing its indices (0-15) and associated RGB values. --uKER (talk) 03:07, 1 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Even in the CGA case it says "The four color bits are arranged according to the RGBI color model". You're right that a palette can be an arbitrary table, but that's not the only thing that a palette can be.  Basically, a palette is a set of available colors, whether indirected through a table or not. Dicklyon (talk) 04:11, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

3-Level RGB is not regular
I noticed that 3-level RGB has been recently moved in the section with the "regular RGB palettes," despite not being "bit levels based" (i.e., the number of levels is not 2^an integer). I was wondering if it would make more sense for this reason to move it back to the section with "non-regular RGB palettes". Itslikeaknish (talk) 15:55, 11 July 2021 (UTC)


 * I moved it to regular, because it has 3-level for each RGB channel, but I guess you are right.... 4-bit RGBI also has 3 levels per channel and is considered irregular. I've moved it back to non-regular
 * The Pasopia is mentioned but on this case the palette was the result of dithering - see http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/PASOPIA_7 and https://monochromeeffect.org/JVCC/2020/05/27/toshiba-pasopia/ 4throck (talk) 16:45, 11 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Found more info about the Pasopia 7. Indeed it dithered between the RGB primaries, but this was handled at an hardware level.4throck (talk) 11:42, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

VGA
Any particular reason why the default VGA palette isn't featured?


 * It's neither RGB nor monochrome. (It's an indexed color palette.) Kufat (talk) 05:40, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

4-bit RGB - 16-colour VGA
The was a 16-colour VGA palette that I recall working with on early PCs, and that I think isn't covered here. As far as I recall, one could somehow select the palette as needed, but the standard palette had, I believe, the 8 colours from the 3-bit RGB, plus the same 8 with added highlight. I have in Talk:Dither suggested the 24-bit colour codes without highlight RGB(0, 0, 0), RGB(0, 0, 170), RGB(0, 170, 0), RGB(170, 0, 0), RGB(0, 170, 170), RGB(170, 0, 170), RGB(170, 170, 0), RGB(170, 170, 170); with highlight RGB(85, 85, 85), RGB(85, 85, 255), RGB(85, 255, 85), RGB(255, 85, 85), RGB(85, 255, 255), RGB(255, 85, 255), RGB(255, 255, 85) and RGB(255, 255, 255) for these 16 colours, but I have no source for that suggestion. (It's two cubes with sides equal to two thirds of 255, the highlighted one shifted one third of 255, i.e. (55, 55, 55), relative to the other.) So, Nø (talk) 13:25, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
 * 1) should we include this palette in the present article - with or without RBG codes?
 * 2) are my codes (i) correct; (ii) a sensible choice, but there is no such thing as "correct" here, or (iii) wrong or unsensible?