Art-I'm actually partially on your side--I agree that 8 bits is mostly the limit of what humans can discern. There are rare cases of large, "shallow" (not much tonal range) gradients that haven't been dithered, either artificially or by film grain, that can show banding. But again, that's rare. And in any event, there are NO output solutions I know of that actually support 16-bit, so whether or not we can discern 16-bit is pretty much a moot point.
The only time I'm saying 16-bit matters is when you make tonal adjustments, either gamma/levels/curves or dodging and burning. These throw away data. To have 8 bits of significant data when you're done you have to start with more than 8 bits. And if you're adjusting things in the scanner, the scanner's bit depth matters. One of the reasons 1990-and-earlier drumscanners do such a horrid job on color neg is that they're only 8 bits internally, spread over a 4.0 dynamic range. The much smaller range of color neg leaves you only 5-6 bits data--generally an ugly mess. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
