Apple's New iMac Can Display 1 Billion Colors: Will You Notice?

Apple announced a major update to its iMac computers last week, including a screen that

can display 1 billion colors. How does that work, and are there real benefits to having such a color-filled display? Most of today's consumer-grade displays feature 8-bit color depth, which means they are capable of outputting 256 shades of each of the three primary colors: red, green and blue. All the combinations of these various shades result in 16.8 million possible colors, otherwise known as 24-bit color. If you increase the color depth, or "bit depth," to 10-bit, then each primary color has 1,024 shades, which results in 1.07 billion possible combinations. This is known as 30-bit color and is what users of the new iMacs will see. [Top 10 Revolutionary Computers]