On 21 Oct 99, at 16:02, Westly Montroos wrote:

> I have a IBM monitor 15 inch, which I bought four months ago. I
> have placed the colour on 16 bit, in the display properties, but I
> am able to place it on 32 bit also. My first question: placing it
> on 32 bit, does it have disadvantage for my monitor? And will it
> slow down my system? I have an 8 mb sdram on board video card.

  One of the features of the VGA interface and its derivatives is
that the colour signal is sent to the monitor in analog form.
Greater colour depth allows the signal to match colours more closely,
but the monitor basically just applies the signal to its drawing
circuits -- there should be no impact on the performance or lifetime
of the monitor from increasing the colour depth.

  Increasing the colour depth *does* require more video RAM.  The
fact that the Display Properties control panel will let you increase
this indicates that the video driver has verified that you have
enough video RAM available.

  Increasing the colour depth will slightly slow drawing operations
to the screen.  The human eye can actually distinguish very close to
24 bits of colur discrimination (which is why 24-bit colour is calle
"TrueColor").  However, the CPu normally works with data in chunks of
8, 16, or 32 bits, and so many good video cards allow a 32-bit mode
which allows screen updates to use a single 32-bit transfer for each
pixel instead of a 16-bit and an 8-bit which would be needed to make
24.
  So the 32-bit setting should provide better colour than 16 bit (how
important this is to you may depend on how much work you do with
scanned photos and the like), with performance not much slower than
16-bit and much faster than "ordinary" 24-bit.  [I'm a bit surprised
that you don't mention a 24-bit setting -- it's *possible* that there
isn't one.  Can you tell me what kind of video adapter it is?]

David G

                Curious about the people moderating your
                   messages? Visit our staff web site:
                     http://nospin.com/pc/staff.html