[Leica] M8 Article in LFI

[faneuil at gmail.com (Eric Korenman)]

The recent article in LFI about the M8 takes on three major issues:

1) IR - they explain it well and the steps to deal with it.

2) Banding - they say it was fixed in the hardware upgrade

3) 8 / 16 bit capture..

..Well here is where I think they turn on the smoke machine and bring in
some mirrors.
They present information about how the data is compressed by the square root
,
but when it comes down to it, it still sounds like a form of lossy data
compression.

IE, The chip captures 14 bit data, crunches  it to a non-linear 8 bit form,
which is latter re-expanded
to bit to form the final 16 bit image file.

So.. Isn't the weakest link in the imaging processing chain an 8 bit format?
LFI then goes on to say essentially "you won't see the difference anyway"

Anyone care to help on the matter? I am missing the point?

Eric