seacritter said:
The overall dynamic range of the system has a lot more to do with the noise floor of the chip than the bit depth of the ADC output... However more ADC bit depth certainly adds more data to work with in the shadows, which gives the subjective impression of better dynamic range. Michael Reichmann has a better explanation of what I'm talking about.
But for me the big advantage of moving from 12 bit to 14 bit color channels was the increased smoothness in color gradients & the ability to work the color in the RAW file without inducing banding. The jump from 8 to 12 was by far the most significant, but 12 to 14 was nice & certainly noticeable in situations with difficult color balance or B&W conversion with the channel mixer where you might be throwing away half the color data or sometimes even working with just one channel. 16 bit would be fantastic for B&W but 14 is already pretty good.
Going back to what I mentioned earlier about survey buttons, I think a lot of people clicked the "more dynamic range" button & Canon took that into account when designing the 1Dx. Unfortunately I don't recall seeing a "more bit depth" button in the surveys... At least high dynamic range & a low noise floor go hand in hand & it's clear that the 1Dx has been optimized for that. I think that that's what the marketing dept means by "better pixels"....
Upvote
0
