You and Your Display
Your display makes light and works just like a digital image.
It has three colors Red, Green and Blue. Which when added together can make any color. Please see
Color.
The pixels on your display are organized by a display controller board in your computer.
See the Digital Images branch on the tree.
If a palette is used the amount of storage required is significantly reduced.
Using a palette for display can significantly speed up any operation to the display.
You can't get something for nothing. With the increased speed comes a degradation in images to far fewer colors.
The problem is worse if the palette used by the display is different than the palette used by an image.
Even worse, if there is more than one image and different palettes are used by the different images.
Or if the image is not a palettized image. The software uses the best it can.
Netscape allows images to be dithered or displayed as the closest color to the color cube. Look under Options then Preferences. Select Images and Security from Set Preferences On.
If dithering is selected your computer must dither the image to your screen.
This takes time. On a transparent image the dithering of the transparent color can cause some of the transparent portions of the image to be visible.
Dithering, causes a grainy appearance.
If you don't dither Backgrounds may be entirely covered up.
For more information about palettes and Netscape please see
palettes
Luckily most display controllers allow the resolution and pixel depth to be set by the user.
Both the array size and the pixel depth can usually be set.
The trade off of array size and pixel depth determine the possible settings of your controller board.
These are limited by the amount of memory that your controller board has on it.
If you are running windows go to the Group Main and click Setup. Go to options and change setup. You have to know where the driver for your display controller board is. A disk may have come with the board. Without a disk you may be able to change the display driver by looking for file names that are similar to the one you are using, from the list of available ones. Quite often there is a directory just for the display in the root. There amy be one under a utilities or dos subdirectory.
4,517 byte GIF
Many display controller boards have display accelerators or use a wider bus for transfer of image data.
This increases the speed that a display can be written to the screen.
However, Bigger screen arrays and deeper pixel depths always cause slower displays.
