Color Depth - Direct Color

Direct Color

As the number of bits increases, the number of possible colors becomes impractically large for a color map. So in higher color depths, the color value typically directly encodes relative brightnesses of red, green, and blue to specify a color in the RGB color model. Other color spaces can also be used.

A typical computer monitor and video card may offer 8 bits of color precision (256 output levels) per R/G/B color channel, for an overall 24-bit color space (or 32-bit space, with alpha transparency bits, which have little bearing on the color precision), though earlier standards offered 6 bits per channel (64 levels) or less; the DVD standard defines up to 10 bits of color precision (1024 levels) for each of the Y/U/V video encoding channels (luminance plus two chrominance channels). The Blu-ray standard only supports 8 bits of color precision per channel.