Bits and Bytes CS Thinking Example 4

Follow the full solution, then compare it with the other examples linked below.

Example 4

hard
A colour system uses 4 bits per colour channel (red, green, blue). (a) How many shades can each channel represent? (b) How many unique colours are possible in total? (c) Compare this to standard 8-bit-per-channel colour.

Solution

  1. 1
    Step 1: (a) 4 bits per channel → 24=162^4 = 16 shades per channel. (b) Total colours = 16×16×16=409616 × 16 × 16 = 4096.
  2. 2
    Step 2: (c) Standard 8-bit: 28=2562^8 = 256 shades per channel, 2563=16,777,216256^3 = 16,777,216 total colours. That is 4096 times more colours than the 4-bit system.
  3. 3
    Step 3: More bits per channel means smoother colour gradients but larger file sizes — a classic space-quality trade-off.

Answer

(a) 16 shades per channel, (b) 4096 total colours, (c) 8-bit has 16.7 million colours — 4096 times more.
Bit depth directly affects quality. More bits per channel allow finer colour distinctions but require more storage. This trade-off is central to understanding digital media representation.

About Bits and Bytes

A bit is a single binary digit (0 or 1), the smallest unit of digital data. A byte is a group of 8 bits that can represent 256 different values (0 to 255), enough to encode one text character. All digital storage and communication is measured in bits and bytes.

Learn more about Bits and Bytes →

More Bits and Bytes Examples

Example 1 easy

How many different values can be represented with 3 bits? List all possible 3-bit binary patterns.

Example 2 medium

Convert between storage units: (a) How many bytes in 2 kilobytes? (b) A file is 3,145,728 bytes — ho

Example 3 medium

An image is 800 × 600 pixels. Each pixel uses 24 bits (8 bits each for red, green, blue). What is th

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