MATLAB: Does MATLAB support 10-bit or 12-bit monitors

MATLAB

I would like to purchase a BARCO monitor which is capable of displaying 10 (or 12) bits of grayscale.  This means the monitor has 1024 (or 4096) levels of gray instead of the usual 256. This is useful for displaying medical images. Is MATLAB able to make use of the additional shades of gray?  Could I use the "image" or "imagesc" functions or do I need to call a different function? 

Best Answer

As of R2015a, MATLAB only supports 8-bit color values.  The reason for this behavior is that MATLAB draws colormapped images as textured quads and the textures are in 8-bit true color format. This means that even though you can use a colormap (which is in double precison) to draw a grayscale image, it can only draw 256 shades of gray.