Bit Depth

sampling; bits per pixel (BPP); monochrome; 256; highcolour; truecolour

A Bit  (or binary digit) is the basic unit of information in computing and telecommunications. BIit is a basic tool

The origin of the word bit is attributed to john W tukey who had first written it on a bell labs memo on 9th jan 1947 in which he contracted ‘binary digit’ to simply bit.

In computing a bit can have only two possible values, 0 or 1, yes or no, true or false, +or -etc.

In the film  tron, there was a character called bit, bit was only capable of answering yes or no answers, when a rest this shape was constantly shifting. When the bit announces the answer yes then it would change its shape into a yellow octahedron and when it announces no then it changes into the 35th stellation of the icosahedrons, colour red.

A byte is a group of 8 bits. (When grouping bits together

Historically a byte was the number of bits used to encode a character of text in the computer, which depended on computer hardware architecture, but today it’s almost always means eight bits- that is an octect.

Bytes or multiples thereof are almost always used to specify the sizes of computer files and the capacity of storage units. Most modern computers and peripheral devices are designed to manipulate data in whole bits or groups of bytes rather than individual bits

Nibble

a group of four bits , or half a byte is sometimes called a nibble or nybble

Computer numbering formats

The amount of possible combinations doubles with each binary digit added-1byte (8bits) has 256 possible values.(every time you add a bit the  potential doubles) eg 2,4,8,16,62,64,128 etc

Bit depth

bit depth specifies how much colur information is available for each pixel in an image(pixel is the block of information on the screen) The more bits of information per pixel, the more available colours and more accurate colour representation.For example, an image with a bit depth of one has pixels with two possible values. black and white. An image with a bit depth of 8 has 2 (8) or 256 possible values. Grayscale mode images with a bit depth of 8 have 256 possible gray values. The bit depth in gray scale images quantifies how many unique shades are available.

RGB images are made of three colour channels. An 8 bit per pixel RGB image has 256 possible values for each channel, which means it has over 16 million possible colour values.

RGB images with 8 bits per channel (bpc) are sometimes called 24bit images( 8 bits x 3 channels =24 bits of data for each pixel)

on a computer it contains 3 colour channels, red green and blue(RGB) each colour has the potential of 256 values. when mixed together they make pure white. so 256x256x256 makes 16777216 values of colour. this is becuase each channel have a bit depth of eight.