A depth of 16 bits corresponds to how many gray values?

• A. 256
• B. 4,096
• C. 65,536
• D. 1,024

Answer: (C)

The number of distinct gray levels is 2 raised to the power of the bit depth. With 16 bits, that’s 2^16, which equals 65,536 possible gray values (typically 0 to 65,535). The other numbers correspond to lower depths: 256 for 8 bits, 4,096 for 12 bits, and 1,024 for 10 bits. So a depth of 16 bits yields 65,536 gray values.