So, I’ve recently started to learn about Display technologies, and I’m having countless questions.
How are able to use 8-bit per channel displays and not run out of system memory?
There must some amount of compression right? Where can I download a true 24 bit image with 1 bit colour occupying 1 bit memory?
In: Technology
> How are able to use 8-bit per channel displays and not run out of system memory?
A display is 1920 x 1080 pixels. Three color channels at 8 bits per channel gives a total of 49,766,400 bits for the pixels of a full-screen image. Memory is usually counted in bytes, so divide that by 8, and you get 6,220,800 bytes, or about 6 megabytes.
A typical modern system has gigabytes (i.e., thousands of megabytes) of RAM. Six megabytes is nothing, unless you’re talking about decades-old computers.
> There must some amount of compression right?
All the most popular image formats (PNG, JPG) have compression.
> Where can I download a true 24 bit image with 1 bit colour occupying 1 bit memory?
Do you mean a raw image? I suggest investigating the BMP (bitmap) file format, see the Wikipedia article [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMP_file_format). BMP is an uncompressed image file format used by early versions of Windows. Some software still supports it. Check to see if your favorite image editing software can save images as BMP. Note, in addition to the image data itself, BMP has a header that has some information about the image.
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