Computer Science – 1.2 Multimedia | e-Consult

A monochrome bitemapped image uses only two colors: black and white. As described previously, it is encoded using 1 bit per pixel. This results in a color depth of 1 bit.

A grayscale bitemapped image, on the other hand, represents shades of gray. Instead of just black and white, it uses a range of gray levels. This requires more bits per pixel to represent the varying intensities. Commonly, grayscale images use 8 bits per pixel, resulting in 2⁸ = 256 possible gray levels. This is known as a 256-level grayscale image. Other common grayscale depths include 16-bit (65,536 levels) and 24-bit (16.7 million colors, often using RGB encoding – see below). The higher the number of bits per pixel, the more shades of gray can be represented, and the smoother the transitions between shades will appear.