Comment by bane

5 years ago

It's so interesting to read about the rediscovery and reengagement with dithering by newer generations. I grew up when dithering was simply a fact of life because of the extremely limited graphics capabilities of early computers.

I love the reference to Obra Dinn as the graphics remind me of very fond feelings I had for the first black and white Macintoshes. There was something wonderful about the crisp 1-bit graphics, on a monitor designed for only those two colors, that made it look "better" than contemporary color displays in most respects -- almost higher resolution than it actually was. It's kind of almost impossible to replicate how it looked on modern color displays.

I didn't experience that feeling looking at an electronic display again until the Kindle. It also had the funny side-effect of making art assets on Macintoshes a fraction of the size as on color systems, making both the software smaller, and the hard-drives hold more.

There's also something somewhat unsatisfying about automatically generated dithering patterns used to recast color graphics into 1-bit b&w. It seems to really take an artist's hand to make it look beautiful. However, the author of this post ends up with some very nice examples and it's really well written.

If anybody is interested in seeing how the old systems looked, and some great uses of dithering throughout, I'd recommend checking out this amazing Internet Archive Mac in a Browser - https://archive.org/details/mac_MacOS_7.0.1_compilation