content: From the hardware/software perspective, VGA supports 262,144 colors. It introduces the concept of a palette, where the value associated with each pixel isn't a color, but a reference to a "slot" (or entry) on a palette. Each palette slot can be defined to 6 bits red, 6 bits green, 6 bits blue = 18 bits = 262,144 different colors. There are only 256 entries in the palette table (so 256 slots), and thus only 256 different colors can be shown at one time. Also, I think the OP is talking about the physical connector used by VGA, which is analog, and thus supports an infinite number of colors. In practice, 24 bit color was often used with the VGA physical connector, so that gets you back up to 16.7 million colors. No need to sacrifice color depth just because of the good old 15pin VGA connector!