He tried working with an FPGA development board, but that didn’t have enough memory for 24-bit color. The microcontroller du jour – a TI Stellaris – couldn’t get more than 16 bits of color ...

Most graphics formats provide 8-bit color or 24-bit color; however, graphics cards generally have an intermediate 16-bit color range that displays 65,536 colors. See color depth. THIS DEFINITION ...

A method of compressing an image that enables 8 bits per pixel to look almost as good as 24 bits ... one 8-bit blue), each pixel contains one 8-bit number that indexes into the 256-color lookup ...