Digital BW, The Print

Steve Gledhill wrote:
> 
> 
> Dana,
> 
> Not many images have that range \u2013 but lately I\u2019ve been photographing in 
> cathedrals where the deep interior shadows through to the sunlit stained 
> glass windows certainly have that challenge. So ... yes, I really do.

... and you really capture 17 stops of range in 16 bits?
How do you technically achieve that?  Isn't the TIFF encoding
a linear value?  In which case, I wouldn't expect more than
16 stops (at best) to be possible in the TIFF file, right?

Dana