High color

High color graphics (variously spelled Highcolor, Hicolor, Hi-color, Hicolour, and Highcolour, and known as Thousands of colors on a Macintosh or TrueColor on a Atari Falcon) is a method of storing image information in a computer's memory such that each pixel is represented by two bytes. Usually the color is represented by all 16 bits, but some devices also support 15-bit high color. High color graphics (variously spelled Highcolor, Hicolor, Hi-color, Hicolour, and Highcolour, and known as Thousands of colors on a Macintosh or TrueColor on a Atari Falcon) is a method of storing image information in a computer's memory such that each pixel is represented by two bytes. Usually the color is represented by all 16 bits, but some devices also support 15-bit high color. More recently, high color has been used by Microsoft to distinguish display systems that can make use of more than 8-bits per color channel (10:10:10:2 or 16:16:16:16 rendering formats) from traditional 8-bit per color channel formats. This is a distinct usage from the 15-bit (5:5:5) or 16-bit (5:6:5) formats traditionally associated with the phrase high color. In 15-bit high color, one of the bits of the two bytes is ignored or set aside for an alpha channel, and the remaining 15 bits are split between the red, green, and blue components of the final color, like this: