[userbinator]

What's old is new again: plenty of lower-end TN LCD panels pull the same colour trickery to fake 8-bit colour from 6-/7- bit panels (or, reportedly, 10-bit deep colour from 8-bit ones in some cases).

That's known as temporal dithering/FRC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_Rate_Control ). To get the 2 more bits of "fake" colour depth requires a 4-frame cycle, on which you display either the darker or lighter colour in sequences like 0000, 1100, 1110, and 1111. It's a form of PWM and the same technique used to drive those large outdoor graphic LED display signs, although to avoid flickering the frequencies are in the tens of kHz.