Darboshanski opened this issue on Sep 10, 2008 · 20 posts
bagginsbill posted Sat, 13 September 2008 at 4:35 PM
This is a common fallacy. It is most certainly not enough.
The statement about humans being able to distinguish 10 million colors is nonsense. I could just as easily say you can't tell a straight line from a curved one. Remember that there are interesting optical illusions that demonstrate situations where humans cannot tell that a straight line is straight. Does that mean we should go out and let all our houses be crooked? Hardly.
Yes there are situations where 16.7 million colors is more than enough. However, I'll show you one right here where it isn't enough.
In this image (click for full size), on my awesome monitor, I can see banding in both balls. One of these balls is rendered in 8-bit (16.7 million colors) and the other is rendered in 6-bit (262 thousand colors).
All of you should be able to tell which is the 6-bit. If you can't, you have a terrible monitor - probably one of those 6-bit monitors.
As I said, I can see color banding in both balls. The 8-bit bands are much more narrow, but they are there.
(In case you don't know what banding is, it is a phenomenon where you are presented with a continously varying gradient over a small brightness range, and the computer doesn't have enough colors to show all the tiny changes. As a result, you get big sections all with the same color, which is wrong.)
On the 6-bit ball, the banding will actually make you think that there are sections where the bottom of a band is brighter than the top of the same band. That is an optical illusion, caused by the sudden jarring transition between bands.
Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)