The final form of Hold-And-Modify was, hardware-wise, functionally the same as the original HSV concept, but instead of operating on those three descriptive components (mostly prioritising the V component), it modifies one of the three RGB color channels. HAM can be considered a lossy compression technique, similar in operation and efficiency to JPEG minus the DCT stage; in HAM6 mode, an effective 4096-color (12-bit) playfield is encoded in half the memory that would normally be required - and HAM8 reduces this still further, to roughly 40%. There is a however a payoff for this simplistic compression: a greater overall color fidelity is achieved at the expense of horizontal artifacts, caused by the inability to set any single pixel to an arbitrary 12- (or 18, 24) bit value. At the extreme, it can take three pixels to change from one color to another, reducing the effective resolution at that point from a "320-pixel" to approximately "106-pixel" mode, and causing smears and shadows to spread along a scanline to the right of a high contrast feature if the 16 available palette registers prove insufficient.