16-bit color, the math allows us to define billion’s of color values, but that doesn’t change the fact we still can’t see 16.7 million colors in the 24 bit encoding of these pixels. As such, it’s best to talk about encoding having a potential to define millions or billions of numbers, device values, that could be associated to a color value thus color, if we could see them. But if we can’t differentiae them visibly, it is silly to suggest they are indeed colors. Don’t confuse a color number, a device value, for a color, a color you can
see!
When the display vendor advertises 1 billion colors, a knowledgeable reader takes that as "supports 10-bit per channel data" and connects this to the value of the 2 extra bits for emerging performance standards and evolving formats. But sure, my fav example is Photoshop Lab has like poor coding efficiency, so 1/3 of the values available correspond to no idea of color whatsoever! Compared to sRGB or CMYK it has like 30% efficiency and designers used to dump their data into Lab to perform a quick chop not realizing they'd put their image through a colander. But as you rightly note, you can get away with very few bits if they're properly perceptual distributed. Isn't this the beautiful thing about all compression modes? If you understand the model and the coding, you don't fret about it, unless you see it being misused, you just understand the limits of the tool. So I am not hung up about the word color in context. I do share your sense that marketing could do a better job of helping built understanding. But for a full generation, marketing was as much about bullshitting that a competitors claims don't matter as it was about communication. The distinction between teaching and persuading. Why does marketing it have to be so obtuse? I've tried writing ad copy and it's hard. I began to see that almost all simple speech is lying because it's so context dependent. And who are "you" to decide the conventions of thought? IOW, act freely but do so at your own peril :) There was this little company called Apple Computers back in the day, they they invented something cool and for Ridley Scott to design a compelling ad about how their main competitor was like a "big brother" telling all the thralls what to do. Later after a lot of success, they invoked Einstein and Picaso as their mascots. Think Different they said. Now they are like the Borg andtheir leaders moved to a big donut shaped spaceship and seem not to care about anything but themselves. C'est la v... Something. I do share your sense of the danger of a culture that traffics deeply in BS, And I worry more about since the internet let me meet "fan culture," and now I am stunned into amazement at how baby Yoda is as significant a popular concern. But the term "color" in "1 billion colors" context seems pretty innocent. Salut