Bit-map size is limited by available memory. The maximum width and height are 64KB. Typically, the following standard bit-map formats are used:

    Bitcount           Planes
       1                  1
       4                  1
       8                  1
      24                  1

All presentation drivers must be able to create and use all of the standard formats. However, presentation drivers for two-color devices will lose the color information.

The device context handle supplied to this function must never be NULL, because bit maps always belong to some device. The bit map is created on the device specified and can be selected to a different device later because the graphics engine can handle transfer of bits from one device to the other. When a presentation driver supports only a single color format, requests for other color bit-map formats are mapped to the supported function. No error is returned.