Q:  Will either of your color products (NeXTdimension or NeXTstation Color) support color lookup tables?  What about NEXTSTEP for Intel Processors?

A:  The NeXTdimension supports full 32-bit "real" color--approximately 16 million colors can be displayed at any given pixel.  The hardware is configured as 8 bits of each color component: red, green, blue and alpha.  The alpha component may be used to record relative transparency for any given pixel.

The NeXTstation Color supports 16-bit color--4 bits each:  R, G, B and alpha. This allows 4096 different colors to be displayed at any given pixel.  In addition, the WindowServer uses dithering to make the images look more realistic.  Neither machine supports color-mapped color.

NEXTSTEP for Intel Processors follows the same guidelines as the black hardware does.  At this time, the maximum color resolution supported on Intel hardware is 16-bit color.

Q:  When using the color machines can I turn the color "off" (so that it will run in 2-bit mode) to increase performance?

A: No.  The i860 processor on the NeXTdimension board speeds up the color operations to give performance equivalent to a monochrome cube with a MegaPixel display.

Q:  If I read a TIFF file into the NeXT which contains a color palette, does the sofware understand the palette correctly or does it ignore that information as in 1.0?

A:  Although NeXTStep does not, in general, support palette-based imaging, there is limited support in Release 2.0 and later.  TIFF files which contain 8-bit palettes of 24-bit color values are read in and converted to 32-bit color images; other palettes-based images are not understood.

QA607

Valid for 2.0, 3.0