Setting different color for each series in scatter plot on matplotlib

I don't know what you mean by 'manually'. You can choose a colourmap and make a colour array easily enough:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.cm as cm

x = np.arange(10)
ys = [i+x+(i*x)**2 for i in range(10)]

colors = cm.rainbow(np.linspace(0, 1, len(ys)))
for y, c in zip(ys, colors):
    plt.scatter(x, y, color=c)

Or you can make your own colour cycler using itertools.cycle and specifying the colours you want to loop over, using next to get the one you want. For example, with 3 colours:

import itertools

colors = itertools.cycle(["r", "b", "g"])
for y in ys:
    plt.scatter(x, y, color=next(colors))

Come to think of it, maybe it's cleaner not to use zip with the first one neither:

colors = iter(cm.rainbow(np.linspace(0, 1, len(ys))))
for y in ys:
    plt.scatter(x, y, color=next(colors))