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It is not so much the stacking of quantisation uncertainty at low gain (Though I know people who at the deep end of things are really looking for 1e above the noise floor signals) but the fact that to get the lower read noise you have to give up the ability to measure the top three quarters of the sensors brightness range where with 16 bits you would not.
In terms of dynamic range, appearances are that where changing the gain to 120 or above on this camera restores the dynamic range of the lowest gain setting, it does that as a ratio by quartering the read noise and quartering the maximum reading, compared to lowest gain.
Anyway, I am going to watch the new 16 bit cams with interest, and see if the ZWO spec sheet makes a bit more sense in a few weeks as QHY put their blurb one way and talk about gain "approaching unity" and 1e per ADU count and the ZWO graph shows gain of above unity at the low end and extremely high gain at the other with pixel wells like a thimble. Most of all I am interested to see how they perform in the real world.
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