An ADC compares the analog input voltage to a known reference voltage and then produces a digital representation of this analog input. The output of an ADC is a digital binary code. By its nature, an ADC introduces a quantization error, which is simply the information that is lost. This error occurs because there are an infinite number of voltages for a continuous analog signal, but only a finite number of ADC digital codes. Therefore, the more digital codes that the ADC can resolve, the more resolution it has and the less information lost to quantization error.