Digital BW, The Print

I don't know the code in PS, so I can't comment.  Today I ran a small 
experiment. I scanned a B&W negative on my 2450 in 16 bit mode and saved 
it in 16 bit tiff. I then read the image into Matlab and did some 
analysis on the data. A histogram on the data and found that the active 
bins ran from about 2000 through 16,000. I am going to repeat this with 
a negative with deeper shadows to see if I can light up the lower bits. 
But in any case the difference between the high and low is 14,000 which 
is quite a respectable dynamic range.

My suspicions is PS is basically an 8 bit package with patches, mods and 
fixes to accommodate 16 bit data. It may or may not handle 16 bit data 
according to IEEE standards.

Truman