To me it implies that the images don't get scaled up in the camera (at least it shouldn't if they are in RAW format as I understand) but that they come out as 12 bit images from the 1000D and 14 bit from the 450D, 2 to the power of 12 being 4096 and to the power of 14 being 16384. I think any scaling is then done on the software on the computer - for instance, in CCDCiel, my 100D (14 bit) only shows pixel values up to around 16000, whereas the same camera hooked up to SGPro has saturated pixels at around 65000, i.e., it has been scaled to 16 bit at least for the display.

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