> You can represent a range of 0 to 1,000,000 with a single bit. It's just that you can't do much with that representation :P Tell that to D/A converters every

> You can represent a range of 0 to 1,000,000 with a single bit. It's just that you can't do much with that representation :P Tell that to D/A converters everywhere. > If you tried to display a 10x wider range of brightness using the old 8-bit format, you'd start to see a lot of ugly banding (posterization) much more than you have seen before because-- Because you didn't dither, is why. The only thing you lose with less bits is SNR, and thanks to the wonders of noise-shaping you can pretty much decide where to put this noise. And I'm just going to make a very broad statement that ever since we managed to climb out of 320x200 resolutions, spatial resolution is where you should put it, not in banding. Maybe even one or two bits in the time resolution if you want to get fancy about it. Basic dithering can be as easy as just adding a uniform 0..1 random number just before truncation. Triangle noise (difference of two uniforms) can give a bit better visual accuracy for graphics, but has one or two snags that take attention to get right.