Editing High color (section)

==15-bit high color==

In 15-bit high color, one of the bits of the two bytes is ignored or set aside for an [[alpha channel]], and the remaining 15 bits are split between the [[red]], [[green]], and [[blue]] components of the final color.

Each of the RGB components has 5 bits associated, giving 2⁵ = 32 intensities of each component. This allows 32768 possible colors for each pixel.

The popular [[Cirrus Logic]] graphics chips of the early 1990s made use of the spare high-order bit for their so-called "mixed" video modes: with bit 15 clear, bits 0 through 14 would be treated as an RGB value as described above, while with bit 15 set, bit 0 through 7 would be interpreted as an 8-bit index into a 256-color palette (with bits 8 through 14 remaining unused.) This enabled display of (comparatively) high-quality color images side by side with [[palette-shifting|palette-animated]] screen elements, but in practice, this feature was hardly used by any software.