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Hardware Heritage
Dithering is the art of creating the illusion of color depth where none exists. Early Macs had 1-bit displays (Black & White). To show a photo, they used error diffusion algorithms.
Floyd-Steinberg
The gold standard. It pushes the quantization error to neighboring pixels (right, down-left, down, down-right).
Ordered Dither
Uses a fixed pattern (Bayer Matrix). Faster but more patterned look. Used heavily in Game Boy games.
Atkinson
Developed by Bill Atkinson for the original Mac. It propagates less error, preserving contrast and line detail better than F-S.
Dithering Lab
Error diffusion visualization.
Floyd-Steinberg Matrix
X 7/16 3/16 5/16 1/16