Thanks for everyone trying to explain this to me. I do not understand any of the responses. Could someone please explain this to me like I was a child, and perhaps avoid jargon, acronyms, and the like. I'm really ignorant about this and I'd like to buy a scanner this year. But I'm afraid that, if I don't understand even the most rudimentary information, I'll end up with the wrong scanner. Describing bit depth as color depth, for example, doesn't help me. I'm having the same problem with this as I have with understanding electricity, and all the analogies people give me about garden hoses and water pressure don't seem to make sense.
What is "bit depth" and, perhaps even more important, what's important about it? Jostein wrote: > I think the "bit depth" means how big a binary number the scanner use > to describe a colour or shades of gray. So bigger numbers mean more > colours. Fritz wrote: > Bit depth, is color depth I assume. 24 bits, that is 8 bits per color > channel, is what you need, but before you start to tweak the exposure and > color and curves etc, it is better to have more then that, so your end > result looks better. After that you can go back to 24 bits. A scanner might > do 30 bits or 36 or so, but if it's more then 24 Windows will use 48 bit as > the next step. So it doubles your file sizes. Steve wrote: > Bit depth is the number of bits used to describe the color of a pixel... So > 4-bit gives you 16 possible colors for the pixel, 8-bit is 256 color, etc... Doug wrote: > Be aware that some people will "name" the same color depth differently. > For example, "True Color" generally refers to representation with > twenty-four total bits of color information, eight bits each for red, > green, and blue. Some people call "True Color" 24-bit color and others > call it 8-bit color. -- Shel Belinkoff mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.earthlink.net/~belinkoff/ - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
