Why NASA photos always in B/W

datchcha

I know this is really off topic, but I was just reading about the Mars rovers, and the Phoenix Mars Lander and couldn’t help and wounder why the photos are in B/W. Didn’t the mars rovers send back color photos or were they orginially in b/w only being modified on earth?

Would b/w photos be smaller file sizes? I thought quality was based on image resolution, not color output.

Anyone?

Thank you,

undomiel

If you're applying compression you can compress black and white photos (even lossless) a whole lot better than colour. Plus if you are stripping out the other colour channels you wouldn't need as much information per a pixel. It depends upon how they are encoded i.e. colour you have to encode RGB as three separate bytes while black and white you can just encode intensity as one byte.