Determining Color Depth

What should you choose: "Color Photo" or "Millions of colors"? What about "Grayscale"....

There are many color depth choices for the flatbed scanner and very few for the slide scanner. This is due to the flatbed scanner's diverse input media; from photos to real objects to text and beyond.

The slide scanner only takes-in two media: slides and negatives. Both of these are assumed to be "continuous tone" (blended tonal and color ranges).

 

Color Depth Tablen

Depth	For / Why
Black &White Drawing	crisp line art with no gradients and no anti-aliasing
Color Drawing	crisp colored line art such as silk-screen and logos
Black & White Halftone	accurate reproduction of the "halftone look" such as from newspapers and B/W books
Color Halftone	accurate reproduction of the "halftone look" such as from high quality color halftones. This posterizes the image similar to Color Drawing but with more subtlety
Black & White Photo (Grayscale)	continuous tonal ranges in GRAY can be reproduced with no color cast Quite accurate. Appropriate for JPEG, GIF, high & low-end computer screen use, and printing purposes 256 grays, maximum
Color Photo	continuous tonal ranges in COLOR Appropriate for GIF and low-end computer screen presentations only 256 colors, maximum
Millions of Colors (Color)	THE BEST continuous tonal ranges in FULL COLOR Best for color JPG, High-end computer screen use, printing reproduction but does not do well for line-art or halftones with alot of large dots 16.7 million possible colors