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The Analogy

 

Ok, let me get to the issues that were mentioned previously, but not explained:

Where I stated in the advantages that you get more colors, it is that your resolution is actually separate from the bits per pixel (bpp), but when someone is speaking about resolution, they're usually including bpp. bpp refers to the number of bits used to describe the color of a single pixel on-screen. Usually I'm bad at analogies, but I think I made this one fairly clear.

Let's say I wanted to describe my appearance to you.

Let's assume I'm running 1 bpp. That means I am limited to one word to describe myself. MALE

Instead of 1 word, a computer would have one bit, either on or off. That means that it can display a black pixel (off/0) or a white pixel (on/1).

Now let's move to 2 bpp.
Me: MALE, CAUCASIAN
Computer: four colors to choose from 00, 01, 10, 11.

In case this doesn't make sense, computers are binary (base 2). They deal with 1's and 0's, where humans normally deal with a deci system (base 10). In base 10, your placeholders are 1's, 10's, 100's, 1000's, 10,000's etc.. In base 2, they are 1's, 2's, 4's, 8's, 16's, 32's, 64's, 128's, 256's, 512's, 1024's etc.


Because computers are base 2, the next step in my analogy is 4 bpp.

Me: MALE, CAUCASIAN, BLONDE, BLUE-EYED
Computer: 16 choices, 0000, 0001, 0010, 0100, 1000, 1001, 1010, 1100, 1101, 1110, 0110, 1111, 0011, 0111, 0101, 1011

Do you see the pattern yet?

bpp	Power	Colors
1 2 4 8 16 24	1 2 4 8 16 24	2 4 16 256 65,536 16,777,216

So you can see that the higher your bpp, generally the better pictures will look. The computer can more accurately represent the true color in the picture because it has more colors to choose from, hence less dithering.

Adv/Disadvantages	Performance