Since the fractional part of a number takes up some bits in the field, the range of values possible in a fixed9point value is less than the same number of bits would provide to an integer. For instance, in an 8 bit field, an unsigned integer can store values from 255, but an unsigned fixed-point with 5 bits allocated to the fractional part only has 3 bits left over for the integer value, and so can only store integer values from 7. (The number of distinct values that the two fields can store is the same, 28 = 256, because the fixed-point field can also store 32 fractional values for each integer value.) It is therefore common that a scaling factor is used to store real world values that may be larger than the maximum value of the fixed-point format.