8 Bit to 2 Bit Color

Great question Art! That would be great if someone would explain what 8bit and 2bit mean without saying one is better than the other.

Art,
Print speed is half at 1200DPI. By the way the new Toishiba relables Ricoh is getting are 10 bit color. I believe the bits are an indication of how much digital information is sent to and through the print engine, althought I am no color bit expert. We are now a toshiba dealer also.
JG

A bit is the smallest unit of information a computer understands. It has two possible states: it can be on or it can be off. All computer information is handled in this way.If there are 2-bits per pixel, the number of colors each pixel can display rises to four. Two-bits per pixel means each pixel has 2 bits and each bit has two states: on and off. In mathematical terms, 2 bits x 2 states = 4 colors. In printing we are then talking about the color depth or resolution. The more bits per pixel the greater the depth.
Bit Depth Color Resolution Calculation
1 bit 2 colors 21 (2)
2 bit 4 colors 22 (2x2)
3 bit 8 colors 23 (2x2x2)
4 bit 16 colors 24 (2x2x2x2)
5 bit 32 colors 25 (2x2x2x2x2)
6 bit 64 colors 26 (2x2x2x2x2x2)
7 bit 128 colors 27 (2x2x2x2x2x2x2)
8 bits 256 colors 28 (2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2)
16 bits 65,536 colors 216
24 bits 16,777,215 colors 224
In the same way, bit depth and color depth describe the number of possible colors in a digital image. The number of bits each pixel has is the image's bit depth, and the number of possible colors increases as bit depth increases.

wow! thanx for info. That's a great job!

Your the man! And concise.

That is a good explanation of what 8-bit and 2-bit mean, however both the 6513 and the CMF7000 have 8-bit color. They both print 256(8-bit) gradations of each color (CMYK).

The 8bit vs. 2bit distinction comes in when scanning. According to the CMF7000 spec sheet it has a 2-bit scanner, the 6513 spec sheet says it has an 10-bit scanner. Theoretically the Print quality should be very similar to a 6513, but copy quality should suffer.



There are 10 types of people in this world... those who understand Binary, and those that don't.

[This message was edited by JasonR on Sun February 08 2004 at 07:28 AM.]

[This message was edited by JasonR on Sun February 08 2004 at 07:30 AM.]

Jason:

I was always told by my DSM that the CMF 7000 was 2 Bit Color for printing (and we know DSM are always right) .

However, when I printed color photos from the CMF 7000 and the 6513. The customer actually liked the way the photos printed better on the
CMF 7000. We used the 1200 dpi mode and set the profile to SWOP.

The was a definate drop off in the quality of the color copy.

I know the scanning it 2-bit according to the spec sheet anyway. http://www.ricoh-usa.com/products/multifunctioncolor/specifications.asp?ProductId=57

I really don't understand how 2-bit can give you acceptable quality at all, with only 4 possible gradations, there must be more going on here than the specs say.