Can PSP X6 do 4 bit per pixel?

[Dave G]

If I read in an 8bpp tiff, and decrease colors to 16, then save it, the resulting file is about the same size as the original and when I reload it into PSP X6, and check image information, it reports it as 256 color (8bpp).

Just to make sure that my memory wasn't faulty, I fired up the old XP system and did the same thing on PSP 9. On PSP 9, the files sizes were cut in half and when I read them back in they reported as 16 color/4bpp.

Reading these files into PSP X6 still reported them as 16 color/4bpp. So PSP X6 can read 4bpp files but seems to have lost the ability to write them. (And doesn't even give any warning message like: Due to the limitations of the selected file type, we're going to write it as 8bpp.)

I tried saving them as PNGs thinking that perhaps it was only the tiff writing code that was buggy, but these (in X6) also came back in as 256 color/8bpp.

PSP X6 16.2.0.20 x64