Palettes › ZX Spectrum

ZX Spectrum Colour Palette

Fifteen bright colours. This page lists every colour in the ZX Spectrum palette used by the 8-bit photo converter, with hex and RGB values, explains where the palette came from and how the tool maps a photo onto it, and shows what it does to a real image.

Published 5 September 2026

Machine

Sinclair ZX Spectrum

Released

1982, United Kingdom

Screen

256 × 192 pixels

Colours

15 (8 hues at two brightness levels, black only once)

Mapping in the converter

Nearest colour by RGB distance

A palette built from three switches

Sinclair's ZX Spectrum arrived in 1982 at a price that put a colour computer in an enormous number of British homes, and its palette is about as simple as a colour palette can be. Each colour is made from three on-or-off signals, one each for red, green and blue, which gives eight combinations: black, blue, red, magenta, green, cyan, yellow and white. A separate "bright" flag boosts whichever channels are on. Bright black is still black, so the total comes to 15 colours rather than 16.

That is why every Spectrum colour is a primary or a secondary. There are no browns, no oranges, no pinks and no greys. It is also why Spectrum games look the way they do, with saturated blocks of colour and an energy that no other machine of the era quite matches.

The colours

The normal-brightness colours here use a value of 205 (hex CD) for each channel that is switched on, and the bright versions use 255. Those are the levels most emulators settled on, and they match what a Spectrum looked like on a typical television reasonably well. The real machine's output varied with the TV, so treat them as the standard modern rendering rather than a laboratory measurement.

Attribute clash, and why it matters here

The Spectrum's most famous limitation was not the small palette but how it was applied. The 256 × 192 screen was divided into 8 × 8 pixel cells, and each cell could hold only two colours: an "ink" colour for set pixels and a "paper" colour for the rest, sharing a single bright flag. Move a colourful sprite across a colourful background and the colours of one bled into the cells of the other. Players called it attribute clash, and it is the single most recognisable feature of Spectrum graphics.

The converter does not reproduce attribute clash. It lets every block take any of the 15 colours independently, which produces something more like a Spectrum loading screen drawn by a patient artist than an actual game in motion. If you like the clash look, a pixel size that leaves your image around 32 blocks wide gives a reasonable impression of those 8 × 8 cells.

How the converter maps a photo to it

Each block takes the nearest of the 15 colours by RGB distance. With only primaries and secondaries to choose from, the effect is dramatic. Soft colours are forced to pick a side: a pale blue sky becomes cyan or white, a dusk sky becomes blue or magenta, and skin generally becomes yellow or white with red in the shadows.

In the test scene the gradient sky becomes bands of blue, magenta and yellow, and the sun goes pure white with a bright yellow halo. The five spheres survive well, because saturated red, orange, green and blue all have close matches. The subtle peach sphere on the right is the one that struggles, ending up mostly white and yellow.

Which photos suit it

• Bold, saturated subjects. Sports kits, signage, toys, flowers and anything already close to a primary colour.
• Graphic compositions. Silhouettes, posters, logos, and strong shapes against plain backgrounds.
• Night scenes with coloured light. Neon and stage lighting map naturally onto the bright set.

It is the wrong palette for gentle portraits, muted landscapes and anything where the colours are mostly beige, brown or grey, because none of those exist here and they will be pushed to whichever primary is nearest.

Tips for better results

• Push the saturation of your source photo before converting. Colours that are already vivid land where you expect them to.
• Use a larger pixel size than you would for NES. The Spectrum look is chunky by nature, and larger blocks hide the speckle you get when neighbouring pixels flip between two very different colours.
• If skin tones come out harsh, try Commodore 64 instead, which has real browns and a soft pink.