M. Adam Davis wrote:
> That would suprise me greatly - I would expect experts to complain
> long and loudly if the camcorder only recorded 4096 colors - that
> should be readily detectable by eye.

You can see well more than 4096 colors in a static image.  However when each
pixel is refreshed at least 30 times per second, 12 bits with some temporal
dithering can look very good.

Look at all the color compaction that normal NTSC video gets away with.  The
bandwidth of the color components are greatly reduced from the full
theoretical "pixel" rate.  This color information reduction is based on
human eye perception, so it will work just as well on HD video.  NTSC
composite video looks fine with 8 bits/pixel.

I was giving HD the benefit of the doubt and understanding that it isn't
really compacted into compsite form.  I think even a naive 4-5-3 bit RGB
encoding with +-1/2 LSB of random noise added to each channel before
digitization will look quite good displayed on a normal HD monitor.

I don't know how this particular camera encodes the video, but I was talking
about effective color resolution per individual pixel that you eventually
get to see on a monitor.  Individual frames probably have noticeable noise
on them, but that gets averaged out over a number of frames by the eye,
effectively restoring signal to noise ratio by temporal low pass filtering.


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