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Questy's, Bitmap basics

What is a bitmap?

Any picture you see on the Web (or hot off a scanner, or on a page created with a desktop publishing application) is called a bitmap.
As its name suggests, a bitmap is a map of dots--similar to what you see when you look at a newspaper photo under a strong magnifying glass--that looks like a picture when viewed from a distance.

Filename.BMP

Bitmap BMP was developed by Microsoft and is the native graphics format for Windows users. BMP the default bitmapped images used in the Microsoft Windows world. The images you see when Windows starts up and closes, and the wallpaper that adorns your desktop, are all in BMP format.

There is no compression. BMP tends to store graphical data inefficiently, so the files it creates are larger than they need to be.

In a true color BMP with 16,000,000 colors, each pixel in the bitmap requires three bytes to store its color information. True color is also called 24-bit color, with one byte or 8 bits for the red component, 1 byte for the blue component, and 1 byte for the green component of the pixel's color. In a 256-color BMP, the color information for each pixel is stored in a single byte. That byte tells which of 256 colors on a color palette the pixel should display. All BMP graphics are rectangular. Because BMP files are Windows specific, they do not work on Web pages.

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