In Java, the access modifiers public and protected are used to control the visibility of members of a class, such as variables, methods, and constructors.

• Public members are accessible to any class, whether it is in the same package or in a different package.
• Protected members are accessible to any class in the same package and to subclasses of the class in any package.

In terms of inheritance, the main difference between public and protected is that protected members are only accessible to subclasses, even if the subclass is in a different package. This means that protected members can be used to implement an inheritance hierarchy without exposing the implementation details to other classes.

For example, let's say we have a class called Animal with a protected method called getSound(). This method returns the sound that the animal makes. We can then create a subclass of Animal called Dog. The Dog class can override the getSound() method to return the sound that a dog makes. However, other classes outside of the Animal and Dog packages cannot access the getSound() method.

Here is a table summarizing the visibility of public and protected members in Java:

When choosing between public and protected, you should consider the following factors:

• Do you want the member to be accessible to other classes? If yes, then use public.
• Do you want the member to be accessible to subclasses, even if they are in different packages? If yes, then use protected.
• Do you want to encapsulate the implementation details of the member? If yes, then use private.