List of Monochrome and RGB Palettes - Regular RGB Palettes - 24-bit RGB

24-bit RGB

Often known as truecolor and millions of colors, 24-bit color is the highest color depth normally used, and is available on most modern display systems and software. Its color palette contains (28)3 = 2563 = 16,777,216 colors. This is approximately the number of colors the human eye can distinguish.

The complete palette needs a squared image of 4,096 pixels wide (50MB in memory), and there is not enough room in this page to show it at full. An image of the full palette can be found here.

This can be imagined as 256 stacked squares like the following, every one of them having the same given value for the red component, from 0 to 255.

The color transitions in these patches must be seen as continuous. If you see color stepping (banding) inside, then probably your display is using a Highcolor (15- or 16- bits RGB, 32,768 or 65,536 colors) mode or lesser.

Red = 0	Red = 85 (1/3 of 255)
Red = 170 (2/3 of 255)	Red = 255

This is also the number of colors used in true color image files, like Truevision TGA, TIFF, JPEG (the last internally encoded as YCbCr) and Windows Bitmap, captured with scanners and digital cameras, as well as those created with 3D computer graphics software.

24-bit RGB systems include:

• Amiga Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA) which has a video mode displaying 256 and 262144 colors out of 24-bit color
• Nintendo 3DS
• Later models of Super VGA (SVGA) IBM PC compatible graphic cards
• Truevision AT-Vista graphic cards for IBM PC-AT and compatibles, and NU-Vista for Apple Macintosh.
• All home video game consoles produced after 1992