Ray Wu Pixels, which ones>?

[Skunberg]

So what your saying is the e1.31 and dmx standard is going to be updated to 12bit in the future?

One of the issues with using the 3001 is the amount of data required compared to the other IC chips, the 3001 is by far the most demanding with 12bit and manchester encoding. So if you want to use something like the new budget ECG-P series of controllers coming onto the market that can control 4 universes of strings/strips/modules per output, then the 3001 may not be the best option as the data needed effects the refresh rate which may limit what you can do and use.

Each pixel type has its uses just like each pixel controller so one solution does not fit every situation. But i find the 2801 allows for the best compromise.

Anyone that has been around electronics for any length of time has seen advancement. Look at monitors from one color thru many steps to 16 million colors. Or modems 300 baud to 56,000 baud and then other transfer advancements that put those in the dust. I'm not saying something is coming next month but we all know there will be more advances in colors, speed, volume of data, etc. Controllers to handle these are already in the works and if the first ones fall short because of data transfer rates and processing power, well we've seen that these are easy to over come (we're not using 486's and 2400 baud anymore).
I don't bring this up as 12bit is the only way to go, but just something to keep in mind as we spend our money.

Brian

[jstjohnz]

Another advantage of 12-bit pixels is that you can use the extra bits to set a maximum intensity limit and still maintain 256 dimming steps. It's been mentioned that some pixels run at 10ma to reduce power consumption and voltage drop. With a pixel like the TLS3001, you could do that in software simply by scaling the output so that the maximum intensity is 2047 instead of 4095.

If you do this with an 8-bit pixel you drop your available dimming increments to 128.

[n8huntsman]

Its actually 256 x 256 x 256 for 16 million colors. As Eddy stated

256^3 is the same as 256 x 256 x 256