(3401) A "Bit" of Everything
Mehenaz Choudhry
The Children's Montessori
NO PHOTO WAS AVAILABLE

Abstract


The smallest unit of measurement in computer data is called a bit. Bits can only show two states: on (shown by 1 ) and off (shown by 0 ). As bits on their own do not show valuable information, they are strung together in binary code, to represent words, music and numbers, etc.

In digital photography, the number of colors available in an image is called bit depth. Again, as bits only have two states, the number of colors come only as two to the power of any number. So, 2 to the power of 2 would give 4 colors in an image, etc.

The color pixels in digital images are formed by combining the 3 primary colors: red, green and blue. Also called color channels , each primary color has a bit depth, which shows its intensity value. The bits per pixel (bpp) means the total colors available for each pixel and shows the amount of bits in all 3 colors.

For a single image, the higher its bpp , the more colors are available. As images containing more color have more information, its file size is also bigger. So, the image s bpp is directly linked to the amount of colors and file size of an image.

In this experiment, I shall vary the number of colors in an image and analyze its effect on file size, bpp and downloading time. Through graphs/tables, I will show how the bpp changes the number of colors available to an image.