What Is Hexadecimal? — RGB Explorer

About this interactive

What you're seeing: three sliders for the red, green, and blue channels of a color, each showing its value three ways at once — decimal, two hex digits, and eight binary bits — above a live color swatch, the combined #RRGGBB code, and the full 24-bit binary stream. Why it matters: a hex color code is the most familiar hex string most people ever meet, and lining its six digits up over their own nibbles is the fastest way to see that one hex digit is exactly four bits and nothing more. How to use it: drag any slider and watch every readout move together; push a channel to 0 and to 255 to see 00/FF and 00000000/11111111, and read the binary stream directly under the hex digit it belongs to.

How to use this tool

Drag the R, G and B sliders to mix a colour. Each channel is one byte — a number from 0 to 255 — and each row shows that one number three ways at once: decimal, two hex digits, and eight binary bits.

Below the sliders, the swatch shows the colour you mixed, the six-digit code #RRGGBB sits across six columns, and each digit's own four bits — its nibble — sit directly underneath it. Read straight down a column: B is 1011, 4 is 0100. One hex digit is exactly four bits, every time.

Nothing here is graded. Push a channel all the way to 0 and all the way to 255 to see 00/FF and 00000000/11111111, then set all three the same to make black, white and the greys in between.

What you'll learn

Recognize that a hex string is a compact notation for a binary stream, where each hex digit represents exactly four bits

Aligned to

CompTIA Tech+

1.2 Identify notational systems.

Key terms

Hexadecimal: A base-16 number system using digits 0–9 and letters A–F; each hex digit maps to exactly 4 bits, making it a compact shorthand for representing binary data.
Nibble: A group of exactly 4 bits, equivalent to one hexadecimal digit; two nibbles make up one byte.
Byte: A group of 8 bits; the standard unit for representing a single character or small value in computing, and the building block for larger storage measurements such as kilobytes and gigabytes.
Bit: Short for binary digit, the smallest unit of data in computing, holding a single value of 0 or 1; all digital information is ultimately composed of bits.
RGB: A color model that represents colors by combining red, green, and blue light at varying intensities to produce any visible color on a display.
Color Depth: The number of bits or bytes used to encode color information per pixel, determining how many distinct colors an image can display.

Topics

Hexadecimal Hex Binary Number Systems Base 16 Data Representation Rgb Color

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