By size and range you mean that Id be able to see the planet, and that the glare of the planet would make the rings hard to see? So seeing say...Jupiter, i might be able to see the storms and such on the surface?
Yes, you will be able to see it. I mean the size of the planet in a small scope will be small. That plus the glare might make it a little difficult. Larger scopes not only make the view larger, but also it has the ability to gather more light, so you'll be able to see more detail. The bigger the scope, the larger the view/the more detail that is shown.
The scope won't be powerful enough to see the actual storms on Jupiter(Mine isn't even able to see that). The reason is that the sun's glare off it would be to bright, but with the right eyepiece you'd be able to make out the cloud bands. Unless you had a filter which cuts down on light glare. That might bring out some more detail.
When looking though a telescope, you don't see color. For example, if you were to look at the Orion Nebula, which is one of the brightest deep space objects in the night sky, you wouldn't see the colors you do in photographs. Instead, you'd see a greyish blob. The reason for this is because the light from that object takes awhile to actually get to earth and our eyes aren't sensitive enough to pick up the color. The Sun's light takes about 8 minutes to reach earth. If you were to see a star randomly erupt into a supernova while looking up at the sky, that would have taken place maybe thousands of years ago, but the light from that explosion is just reaching earth/our eyes. Most deep space objects aren't really even visible to the naked eye, because their light doesn't reach earth fast enough and our eyes aren't sensitive enough to see them. This is where a camera comes into play. The reason a camera captures what it does is because it's film/ccd chip is more sensitive to the light and is able to gather it together much better than a human eye can.
So, the planets would basically look greyish in color, too, but because they are close enough to earth, you might be able to see some color. If you looked at Mars (would just appear as a red dot in a small scope) then you could see the reddish hue of it, but not a lot of detail because of the glare.
