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From: gessel@cs.swarthmore.edu (Daniel Mark Gessel)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: ColorStation questions
Message-ID: <5B61MAR@cs.swarthmore.edu>
Date: 25 Apr 91 14:15:29 GMT
References: <1991Apr24.082948.17763@cs.ucla.edu> <559@rosie.NeXT.COM> <1991Apr24.231003@ece.arizona.edu>
Distribution: usa,local
Organization: Swarthmore College, PA, USA
Lines: 29

>This is just wonderful! Here, we thought we were getting a good price
>on a workstation, and 4096 simultaneous colors to boot.  Now, we find
>that the price isn't the only thing that is cheap.  Let's look at the
>bigger picture.  NeXT claims that it can "display" 4096 colors on the
>screen at one time.  What they don't tell you, is that you really have
>control over only 16 colors!.  The rest are all permutations of the
>six that you pick!  You know that is just lovely...once again research
>succumbs to the will of the masses.

Actually, you only have control over 3 colors Red, Green and Blue :-). 
Blow up the image to twice it's size. The dithering will give you 65 
colors for each pixel in the original image. If it's small enough, you
could blow it up four times, giving you 257 different levels.

16 levels of each RGB is quite a few. Things look damn good in that.
The memory and speed requirements for 24 bit color would be too heavy
on the 040 to give the ColorStation the speed it needs. You can
display 4096 colors. You have no control over any of them, they're
hard wired. A decision NeXT made to support the display PostScript
model. A color lookup table would suck. One App would change it,
changing all the colors on the screen. Uuuugly!

As far as advertising is concerned, 24 bit color is often quoted
as "over 16 Million colors". Boy, would that be alot of shades of gray!

Dan
-- 
Daniel Mark Gessel
Internet: gessel@cs.swarthmore.edu