Can someone explain bits per component?

[AshesAndWool]

I'm studying for my IT-exam and one of the basics here is that every pixel uses byte and bits to store information. The text book is a bit outdated so it says that "we use 3 bytes to store color information for each pixel, and we call this 24-bit color depth." Now this confused me a bit because I have a pretty high-end color accurate monitor that has "10-bit color". Now after doing some digging online I now learned that there is something called bits per component and bits per pixel. Am I correct when I guess that the book was referring to the bits per pixel of an image, while my monitor has 10 bits per color component, so because it uses RGB output color format and rgb led-lights in each pixel it actually has 30 bpp (bits per pixel)?

[minibois]

A monitor has pixels. Every monitor has three sub-pixels (red, green and blue). A sub-pixel has a bit value (8 bit, 10 bit or 12 bit nowadays, I'll only be covered 8&12). A bit is a 1 or 0 (on or off).

 

8 bits = 256 values per color ^ 3 = 16.8 million different colors

10 bits = 1024 values per color ^ 3 = 1.07 billion different colors

 

8 bits * 3 = 24 bit, which is where this comes from:

16 minutes ago, AshesAndWool said:

"we use 3 bytes to store color information for each pixel, and we call this 24-bit color depth."

1 byte = 8 bits.

 

Your book just doesn't account for 10 bits, 8 bit + FRC or 12 bit.

[Hairless Monkey]

24 minutes ago, AshesAndWool said:

Am I correct when I guess that the book was referring to the bits per pixel of an image, while my monitor has 10 bits per color component, so because it uses RGB output color format and rgb led-lights in each pixel it actually has 30 bpp (bits per pixel)?

Short answer, yes.

[Tan3l6]

18 minutes ago, minibois said:

 

8 bits = 256 values per color ^ 3 = 16.8 million different colors

10 bits = 1024 values per color ^ 3 = 1.07 billion different colors

I think 8^8 and 8^10 give the good result also (the same)

and 8^12 would be 68 billion. Maybe easier to calculate.

 

the starting 8 is the 2^3 - number of color variations (maybe?)