High color
A color space with 65K colors
High color graphics 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.
In Windows 7, Microsoft used the term high color to identify 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 different and distinct usage from the 15-bit (5:5:5) or 16-bit (5:6:5) formats traditionally associated with the phrase high color; see deep color.
15-bit 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.
Each of the RGB components has 5 bits associated, giving 2⁵ = 32 intensities of each component. This allows 32768 possible colors for each pixel.
The popular Cirrus Logic graphics chips of the early 1990s made use of the spare high-order bit for their so-called "mixed" video modes: with bit 15 clear, bits 0 through 14 would be treated as an RGB value as described above, while with bit 15 set, bit 0 through 7 would be interpreted as an 8-bit index into a 256-color palette (with bits 8 through 14 remaining unused) this enabled display of (comparatively) high-quality color images side by side with palette-animated screen elements, but in practice, this feature was hardly used by any software.
16-bit high color
When all 16 bits are used, one of the components (usually green with RGB565, see below) gets an extra bit, allowing 64 levels of intensity for that component, and a total of 65536 available colors.
This can lead to small discrepancies in encoding, e.g.
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This entry incorporates text from “High color” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.