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The relationship between the number of displayable colours and bit depth
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1 2 Colours = 21=2
2 4 22=4
3 8 23=8
4 16 24=16
8 256 28=256
16
16 (high colour) 65 536 2 =65 536
24 (true colour) 16 777 216 224=16 777 216


Both the screen resolution and the number of displayable colours depend upon the size of the

 The display colour of every pixel on the screen is stored in the frame buffer. If you know the
number of pixels in an image and the number of colours in an image, then you can calculate the size
of the frame buffer that will be needed to display it.

O
consider an image with a screen resolution of 800 x 600 pixels in 24 bit true colour ʹ this is
usually written as 800 x 600 x 24

!"#Calculate the number of pixels in the image ʹ multiply the two resolution figures together.

The number of pixels = 800 x 600 = 480 000 pixels

!$#Calculate the number of bits in the image ʹ multiply the pixels by the bit depth.

The number of bits = 800 x 600 x 24 = 11 520 000 bits

!%#Calculate the number of bytes in the image ʹ divide the number of bits by 8 ( there are 8 bits
in a byte)

The number of bytes = 800 x 600 x 24/8 = 1 440 000 bytes

!&#Calculate the number of kilobytes in the image ʹ divide the number of bytes by 1024 (there
are 1024 bytes in a kilobyte)

The size of the Frame Buffer = (800 x 600 x 24) / (8 x 1024) = 1406 KB

(rounded to the nearest whole number)

!'#Calculate the number of megabytes in the image ʹ divide the number of kilobytes by 1024
(there are 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte)

The number of MB = (800 x 600 x 24) / (8 x 1024 x 1024)

= 1.4 MB

The frame buffer would need 1.4 MB to store the image.