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From: esb31658@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Eric S. Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: NeXTStation Color (again)
Message-ID: <1991Apr25.181814.19762@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 25 Apr 91 18:18:14 GMT
Sender: usenet@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 22

In all of this talk about the color capabilities of the NeXTStation Color,
I have noticed a discrepancy.  From what I have read, the NS color can
display 4096 colors simultaneously from a palette of 16.7 million.  This 
would indicate to me that there is a color lookup table with 4096 entries of
24-bits (not including alpha channel) which would coincide with the 
information from someone at NeXT (I forget who) who said that the NS Color
has 8-bit RAMDAC's for each red, green and blue.

If all of this is true, then the 16-bit color value (12-bits color, 4-bits 
alpha) is not 4-bits red, 4-bits green, 4-bits blue and 4-bits alpha.
It would mean that this value is just an entry in the lookup table and 
completely indepedent of the color that it represents.  This also means
that you can display ANY 4096 of the 16.7 million possible colors on the
screen at any one time (including 256 shades of grey).

Someone please correct me if I am wrong.

Eric S. Brown
esb31658@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu


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