Most humans can discriminate 10 million different colors. As a cinematographer controlling all these shades and hues is a huge undertaking. One of my favorite things to look at is a beautiful graduation of color in the sky as the sun goes down. Those 10 million colors captured by our eyes equate to about 23bits. Our current cameras records in 8bit color space. This makes me sad because I want to make beautiful images like the ones captured with my eyes, but with only 256 colors, I am saddled with banding and macro blocking. Soon, we will able to capture 12+bits thanks to break throughs and cost drops in tech. Using the formulas below, we can calculate this increase in tech will add 3,840 colors to our existing 256. This is a huge deal. When advances in technology become available for me to get closer to the graduations my eyes take in every day, it makes me even more excited to continue pushing my craft.
“Most color images from digital cameras have 8-bits per channel and so they can use a total of eight 0’s and 1’s. This allows for 28 or 256 different combinations—translating into 256 different intensity values for each primary color. When all three primary colors are combined at each pixel, this allows for as many as 28*3 or 16,777,216 different colors, or “true color.” This is referred to as 24 bits per pixel since each pixel is composed of three 8-bit color channels. The number of colors available for any X-bit image is just 2X if X refers to the bits per pixel and 23X if X refers to the bits per channel.”
Source - Cambridge in Colour
