Millions vs. Thousands Colors

macasaurus

I dunno if this is really a software question, but oh well... Is there a big difference between millions and thousands of colors for the display? I don't really see any big differences or performance differances. Does anyone know which I should use for my iBook?

zo

if you do any kind of picture viewing or creation/maipulation, you want millions of colors.



Go to some site with pictures, prefereable hi-res. and set to thousands of colors. They look a bit spotty. Then just change the color depth to millions, and you'll see right away that it looks better.



If you just do word processing, mail, normal web browsing... then it doesnt really matter that much.



I have to say that in 10.1.x on my iBook 600 8MB vram putting to thousands of colors would make a difference in speed. Now in 10.2 Ive always had it at millions and there is basically no difference in speed.

macasaurus

thanks

dhagan4755

Can I just throw in that if you have an iBook or any G3 with low RAM, using OS X in thousands of colors will improve performance with the OS. It won't seem as doggy. This is mostly applicable to education, where OS X is just starting to get exposure.

luca

I haven't really done any comparative tests, but I haven't noticed any difference between thousands and millions of colors, and this is on a 233 MHz G3 with a 4MB Rage Pro video card.



Maybe it's because it's very slow on both, or maybe it's because it doesn't make much of a difference. Either way, I always find it works better in millions, in all situations. Almost everything looks better that way.

andrew xt

If you have it set on millions of colours your monitor actually displays higher colour depth than the human eye can see! So from our point of view it's actually an infinite number of colours.



Andrew

luca

Perhaps... I've heard that 32 bit color, not 24 bit color, is truly an "infinite" amount of color (24 bit is 16 million, 32 bit is 4 billion). Although you can't tell the difference between one color and the next hue brighter/darker or whatever, some people can see a tiny amount of dithering (is that what it's called?) on really gradual color changes, like CG smoke. Not really enough to matter. In thousands of colors, though (16 bit), there is quite a bit of graininess present.

eugene

32-bit color is 8-bits red, 8-bits green, 8-bits blue and 8-bits wasted.

ebby

Isn't there an alpha channel in there somewhere?

overhope

Not on RGB displays...

eman

I never could tell the difference between the two so that's why I use only thousands.

airsluf

eugene

[quote]Originally posted by EmAn:

<strong>I never could tell the difference between the two so that's why I use only thousands.</strong><hr></blockquote>



Surely you can tell the difference. Select a solid colored desktop background like "Solid Gray" and look at the dithering. Look at the drop shadows. the human eye can easily discren more than 65536 colors.

buonrotto

FYI, the human eye can differentiate between millions of colors, but in a relative manner, not in absolute terms. That is, you have to see a lot of them side by side to see the differences.

niji

biggest difference to me on an iBook dual is that the grey pinstripes of os x,running thousands of colours, is terrible. you need to run millions in order for it to be less pronounced.

thnx



[ 09-23-2002: Message edited by: niji ]</p>

his dudeness

I notice almost no difference in speed on my G3 Powerbook at all. I just keep it set at millions.

dhagan4755

Would I be out of line by saying that I hope they dump the "pinstripe" look in 10.3 Panther....much like they did in the dock for 10.2?

multimedia

I noticed a difference when Quartz Extreme kicked in. I was always using Thousands up to that time. But suddenly, I discovered that Quartz Extreme doesn't like Thousands. With Millions the QE text engine is way better. So it's not just about colors any more. It's text rendering now. Ironicly, Millions is faster and sharper text than Thousands to my experience.



Anyone else notice that?

spart

[quote]Originally posted by EmAn:

<strong>I never could tell the difference between the two so that's why I use only thousands.</strong><hr></blockquote>



Are you completely colorblind?



Thousands looks horrible...even on LCD displays, and your iBook has one of the better ones.