I'm not sure what you're talking about with "flashing two different shades of a color to produce one in between".
I believe some panels do this internally, to simulate a wider color gamut, but I wouldn't expect any current video source to do it.
Dithering is often used by alternating
PIXELS of multiple colors (but at the same time), to create "in between" colors, and can be used for printed or screen images.
Dithering is still used today with printing, and with some low-res screen images, but is generally avoided because it trades resolution for colors.
(But I haven't heard of any actual video source alternating colors to produce in between ones lately - although it's certainly possible.)
Generally, when computer graphic systems talk about "32 bit color" what they're talking about is 24 bit color (RGB 8:8:8) plus 8 bits of transparency.
This is important when doing graphic rendering and compositing... but isn't really a characteristic of the video going out to the monitor.
This would be a setting on your video card because the video card does graphics processing.....
(This feature is used on video games, for example, to merge a moving character on top of a background, or to merge several levels of different objects.)
In modern terminology "12 bit color" means 12 bits per color, which would be a total of 36 bits in RGB, or 48 bits of RGB + Z (transparency).
(It's written both ways - which makes it confusing. It's supposed to be obvious which they mean by the overall number and whether it's divisible by 3 or 4.)
Chroma 4:4:4 is a whole different issue.
Normal UHD Blu-Ray discs use what's known as Chroma 4:2:0.
What this
MEANS is that the
GREEN image is stored at full resolution, while the
RED and
BLUE images are stored at half resolution.
While this sounds nasty, since that aligns perfectly with how sensitive our eyes are to the various colors, it
IS the optimum usage of the available bandwidth.
Your eyes are more sensitive to sharpness in the green, so that's the most important, and you don't notice a slightly lower resolution in the other colors.
(Which is another way of saying that 4:2:0 gives you the best picture that will fit into the space that's available for it.)
HOWEVER, when you send computer
TEXT (small white characters with narrow lines and dots), it doesn't work so well.
You end up with those annoying little color fringes where the slightly blurrier red and blue color planes "slop over" the green image.
(Instead of clean white letters, you end up with white letters with little rainbow fringes around them.)
This may be made better or worse if you enable some of the various "sharpening" and "processing" options on your TV.
With Chroma 4:4:4, all three colors are sent at the same resolution - so there are no color fringes.
It is important to note, however, that having Chroma 4:4:4 capability doesn't make any difference if you're playing a 4k UHD disc - because the disc itself is limited to Chroma 4:2:0.
However, it matters quite a bit if you plan to use your TV as a computer monitor - especially if you plan to display small text.
(Not at all important for playing videos; may be somewhat important for some video games;
VERY important for big spreadsheets or text documents with small print.)
8 bits for RGB= red 8, blue 8, green 8...so it becomes 24 "bits". Computer use a faux color scheme that flashes 2 different shades of a color to create a "perceived" color shade in between.
