A bit (or binary digit) is the basic unit of information in computing and telecommunications.
The origin of the word “bit” is attributed to John W. Tukey, who had first written it on a Bell Labs memo on 9 January 1947 in which he contracted “binary digit” to simpily “bit”. In computing, a bit can only have two values 0 or1, yes or no, true or false, + or -, etc.
Bit is also a character from the movie Tron. Representing a bit(binary digit), it was only capable of providing yes or no answers to any questions. Physically, Bit was represented within the movie by a blue polyhedral shape that morphed between the compound of dodechahedron and icosahedron and the small triambic icosahedron.
A Byte is a group of 8 Bits.
Historically, a byte was the nuberof bits used to encode a charcter of text in the computer, which depended on computer hardware architecture; but today it almost always means eight bits- that is, an octen.
Bytes, or multiples thereof, are almost always used to specify the sizes of computer files and the capacity of storage units. Most modern computers and peripheral devices are desined to manipulate data in whole bytes or groups of bytes, rather than individual bits.
Nibble – A group of 4 bits or half a byte, is sometmes called a nibble or nybbyle.
Computer Numbering Formats– The amount of possibele combinations doubles with each binary digit added- I Bytes (8 bits) has 256 possible values.
Bit Depth– Bit depth specifies how much color information is available for each pixel in an image. The more bits of information per pixel, the more available colours and more accurate colour representation. More bits=more information for each pixel=more colours.
For example an image with a bit depth of I has pixels with two possible values: black and white. An image with a bit depth of 8 has 2(8), or 256, possible values. Grayscale mode images with a bit depth of 8 have 256 possible gray values.
RGB images are made of three colour channels. An 8bit per pixel RGB image has 256 possible values for each channel whcih means it has over 16 million possible colour values.
RGB images with 8bits per channel (bpc) are sometimes called 24bit images (8 bits x 3 channels = 24 bits of data for eachpixel) 256 x 256 x 256 gives you 16,777,216 values.
Here are some HDR (high dynamic range) images
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