Displays - Pixels - Part 1

Displays are part of everyday life. Be it our mobile screen, Television screen, PC screen, display forms a most important human interface. From the age old CRT displays to the latest OLED type displays, the display technology has been evolving day by day. Did we ever think of curved displays to be designed? Let us discuss about different display technologies and terminologies in series of articles.

Pixels on the screen:

Be it any display, the display arrangement is in the form of pixels. A single pixel is also called “Picture element”. The pixels are arranged in the x and y direction. The pixel information will be taken care by the operating system of the processor to which display is connected which helps to form an image on the screen.

1-bit/B&W displays:

1-bit displays are used to represent Black & White displays. Based on the bit value of 0 or 1, Black or white value is represented. 

8-bit/256-color displays:

8-bits of information are dedicated for each pixel which can vary up to 255 combinations. So, a 8-bit color displays can have up to 256 colors. These are used in color displays which came immediately after black and white displays.

24-bit/True color displays:

24-bits are used to represent each pixel on the screen. Each pixel uses 8-bit for R, G, B to form a color. This gives complete color information compared to 8-bit displays and are called true displays. Each pixel can represent up to 16M (16777215 in particular) colors.

RGB combinations:

The pixel color information will be a RGB model where the respective color of the pixel can be formed by the percentage of combination of RGB. Full percentage of RGB (255,255,255) represents a white where as the null combination of RGB (0,0,0) forms black.