gray scale

gray scale

A series of shades from white to black. The more shades, or levels, the more realistic an image can be recorded and displayed, especially a scanned photo. Scanners differentiate typically from 16 to 256 gray levels.

Although compression techniques help reduce the size of graphics files, high-resolution gray scale requires huge amounts of storage. At a printer resolution of 300 dpi, each square inch is made up of 90,000 pixels. At 256 levels, it takes one byte per pixel, or 90,000 bytes per square inch of image. See halftone.

---

gray scale [′grā ‚skāl]

(optics)

A series of achromatic tones having varying proportions of white and black, to give a full range of grays between white and black; a gray scale is usually divided into 10 steps; however, electronic scanners can typically differentiate 16 to 256 levels.