On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Daniel.Egger@xxxxxxx wrote: > On 25 Mar, Blue Lang wrote: > > A lot of laptops, especially running linux @ 1024x768, will only > > support 8 bit depth. Dunno if it matters to ya or not. :P Gimping on > > the plane, ahh. > > Really? But that's not a limitation of the notebook I hope... > The techniques used in notebook LCD's allow normal notebooks to > run at full 15/16 bit or even in simulated 24/32bit (the circuts > convert the real 20bit to 24 or 32bit) Well, there are some (old) laptops that do not support anything else than 8 bits depth because of some limitations of the video cards, even if the LCD display is capable of displaying true colors (24 bits). Also, some LCD screens look very bad if you do not use them at their maximum resolution (or exactly half of it) because you get some ugly aliasing artifacts on the screen. Here is a list of cases in which I use the Gimp on a PseudoColor display (8 bits, 256 colors): - On my old latpop, because it can only display 800x600 (8 bits) or 640x480 (24 bits) but the latter does not look good and is not usable with the Gimp because many menus are taller than the screen. - On some of the Sun workstations at work, including the one from which I am typing this e-mail, because they still have an old video card that only supports 8 bits. - When I connect a laptop to a video beamer, because it suffers from the usual LCD aliasing problems when it is not used at its maximum resolution and the laptop can only support 8 bits at that resolution. On the other hand, I will sometimes switch the laptop to a 24 bits mode (and suffer from the menu size problems at 640x480) when I want to work on something that involves more colors than a simple GIF icon for a web site. So the Gimp must support both: - low bit depth (8 bits) - low resolution (640x480) because there are valid use cases for both. Hmmm... I just hope that nobody has to suffer from both problems at the same time. -Raphael
