This brings us to our discussion of color depth. Like I said before, as far as the computer is concerned, a scanner photo is just a convenient arrangement of pixels next to each other. To break this down further, each pixel consists of a long row of 0s and 1s which decide which color the pixel is going to be. The more 0's and 1's used per pixel, the more colors can be represented. Needless to say, most color pictures have more than 256 colors in them.
Different scanners have different color depths.
Considering that all data on the computer is represented by 0s and 1s, it is obvious why using more 0s and 1s per pixel would result in a larger picture file. It is also obvious that using more 0s and 1s per pixel will allow a scanner to more accurately represent colors. I have to say that as a minimum one should get a scanner that can record 24-bit color. The poor quality and accuracy of any color depths less than 24-bit can definitely be noticed. So, for the purposes of this article I conducted a little experiment.