Scanner Trivia – The More You Know! #3

Did you know – While modern scanners come in a wide array of colors, the earliest scanners operated on a much simpler color depth array and were mostly limited to scanning in binary. For some context, color depth is characterized by the number of bits which an image contains, with a single bit representing a basic unit of information. Bit quality ranges from 1-bit images (which, like the earliest scanners, operate on a binary black-and-white system) to 48-bit images (which draw from a pool of billions of different colors). Most modern scanners (including the large format scanners which we specialize in) come prebuilt with 24-bit color depth, at the very minimum. 24-bit color has become the industry standard, and is commonly referred to as “true color”. A 24-bit color display is capable of rendering 16,777,216 different colors dynamically. 30, 36 and 48-bit color arrays are even more diverse, and are referred to as “deep color”. That’s a whole lot of color, given that the standard 8-bit image format of the 80’s and 90’s was only capable of rendering 256 different colors.