Use of this palette ensures that areas of colour on 256-color systems are displayed without graininess from "dithering" (colour-matching by mixing two or more colors to simulate a colour unavailable in the palette). The 40 remaining colors of the 256 are used by the system to display the portions of your screen's "real-estate" hijacked by your browser. Try the Arachne graphical browser for DOS for the option of displaying webpages fullscreen!

This palette uses a mathematical approach to give an even distribution of colours. Other palettes are available for graphics software, with a greater emphasis placed on fleshtones etc. to allow acceptable quality color-depth reduction of photographic images. Photographs to be displayed at small scale onscreen can look fine when reduced to 32 or even 16 colours and saved as GIFs. These images will download and display more quickly than their high color depth counterparts.