A Bit (binary digit) is the basic unit of information in computing and telecommunications. The origin of the word Bit is attributed to John W. Tukey, who had first written it on a Bell Labs memo on 9th January 1947. In computing, a bit can have only two possible values: 0 or 1, yes or no, true or false, + or – etc. Bit is also a character in the movie Tron. The representation of bit was only capable of providing yes or no answers to any questions.
A Byte is a group of 8 Bits. Hisotically, a Byte was the number or bits used to encode the character of text in the computer, which depended on computer hardware architecture; but today it almost always means 8 bits. Bytes, or multiples thereof, are almost always used to specify the sizes of comuter files and the capacity of storage units. Most modern computers and peripheral devices are designed to manipulate data in whole bytes or groups of bytes, rather than individual bits.
A Nibble is a group of 4 bits or half a byte.
Computer numbering formats. The amount of possible combinations doubles which each bit added 1 bit (8 bytes) has 257 possible values.
Every colour pixel in a digital image is created through some combination of the three primary colors: red, green, and blue. Each primary colour is often referred to as a “colour channel” and can have any range of intensity values specified by its bit depth. The bit depth for each primary colour is termed the “bits per channel.” The “bits per pixel” (bpp) refers to the sum of the bits in all three color channels and represents the total colors available at each pixel.
Bit depth specifies how much colour information is avaliable for each pixel in an image. The more bits of information per pixel, the more avaliable colours and more accuarte colour represenations (more bit = more information for each colour). For example, an image with a bit depth of 1 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 has 256 possible gray values.
RGB images are made of three colour channels. An 8bit per pixel RGB image has 256 possible values for each channel which means it has over 16 million possible colour values. RGB images with 8bits per channel (bpc) are sometimes called 24bit images (8bit x 3 channels = 24 bits of data for each pixel).
For example most colour images from digital cameras have 8-bits per channel and so they can use a total of eight 0’s and 1’s. This allows for 28 or 256 different combinations—translating into 256 different intensity values for each primary color. When all three primary colors are combined at each pixel, this allows for as many as 16,777,216 different colors. This is referred to as 24 bits per pixel since each pixel is composed of three 8-bit color channels.
24 bit per pixel (bbp)
16 bbp
8 bbp
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