Need some color? How about 16 million colors?
I’ve seen some reviews of Smart Light bulbs, LED strips or devices like the Amazon Echo Show and the reviewers always repeat one of the marketing points of the RGB lights – it can do 16 million colors.
Whoa! Imagine what you can do with 16 MILLION colors! You could spend a light time looking through 16 MILLION colors and never see the same one twice.
An average lifetime has 40 million minutes in it so you could pick a new color every other minute! Of course, you might want to sleep at some point.
Are 16 million colors better than 14 million? Not, really, a lot of colors is a lot of colors. Basically all of these RGB devices are using the same math.
Just like the color wheel you made in High School art class with primary colors, you have three separate LEDs used to mix the colors – Red, Green and Blue. Each of the 16 million colors are made by changing the intensity of these LEDs.
Each of the LEDs can be set between off (0) and 256 (highest setting).
The standard RGB color model, using 8 bits for each of the red, green, and blue channels, allows for 16,777,216 (256 x 256 x 256) distinct colors.
A photograph in a magazine is printed with a similar combination of the three primary colors which combine in the viewer’s eye to create the image.
It’s the same math used in a camera sensor or in a digital print. Think of a single color changing smart bulb as one pixel in a digital image.