In the high-resolution quantization approximation, a smooth input distribution varies little across one conversion interval, so rounding to the nearest level gives an approximately uniform quantization error . Therefore
The input must stay within the analogue-to-digital converter's range. A large standard deviation alone does not guarantee uniform quantization error: an input concentrated exactly on widely separated conversion levels has zero error. Truncation without a half-step correction also has a different mean and root mean square.
rounding an unclipped voltage to equally spaced levels of separation leaves error in . If the fractional position within a conversion interval is uniformly distributed, direct integration gives zero mean and expectation value . This is a statistical model for the error, not a claim that the converter adds independent white noise for every possible input.