bit per pixel

Information unit

Name	Symbol	Quantity	Expressed in terms of SI base units
bit per pixel	bit/px	colour depth
Definition The bit per pixel, symbol bit/px, is the unit of digital colour depth.

Colour depth

The number of distinct colours that can be represented by a single pixel is proportional to 2 to the power of the value of the colour depth in bits per pixel.

Examples of colour depth

colour depth (bits per pixel)	colours	colours (hexadecimal)	colours (decimal)
1	21	216	2
2	22	416	4
4	24	1016	16
8	28	10016	256
15	215	800016	32 768
16	216	1 000016	65 536
24	224	100 000016	16 777 216