Palm Ships With 12-bit Screen, Says 16-Bit On Box

Launch was among the many readers to point out that "Palm recently announced that they made a mistake in their product description of the m130... it doesn't have the 16-bit screen they advertised. Rather then admit the mistake, Palm is using every ounce of their spinning power to mislead its less tech-savy customers into believing that the palm m130 can display 58,621 'color combinations' rather then the 'more than 65,000 colors' it had previously stated; only a 11% difference. This tricky language is meant to shade the fact that a 12-bit screen can only display 4,096 colors... that's a 93% difference." Have they not learned from the mistakes of history? On the other hand, the screen resolution is 160x160 pixels.

Comments

Palm Infocenter has complete story

[Launch]

Apparently this debate has been going on a long time... Palm info center has a good article about it... And the PIC forum where the debate first broke.

Re:Blending techniques

[roarl]

ok, graphics geeks... factor 58,621. You get 31 x 31 x 61. Looks like 5-bits, 5-bits, and 6-bits, blended. I'm wondering how they came up with that number of colors! Any ideas?

By dithering (mixing) 4 pixels in a 2x2 pattern, 16 colors can be mixed into (16-1)*4+1 = 31 colors. By dithering 2x1 pixels, 16 colors can be mixed into (16-1)*2+1 = 15 colors. So, by using a 2x2 dither pattern for green, and a 2x1 dither pattern for red and blue, 31x31x61 colors can be produced.

I do believe this is the correct explanation, but it seems so contrived that I suspect some boss ordered his engineer to invent a reason to come up with a number close to 65536. In a program, it would be much easier to do a 2x2 dither pattern for all three components, yielding 226981 colors.

For interested readers, a transition from one color to another using a 2x2 dither pattern can be as follows.

00 10 10 11 11
00 00 01 01 11

As you see, two colors turns into (2-1)*4+1 color patterns.