alt Hacker NewsHuman eyes can quite reliably see greater than 8 bit color. While the eye is only able to differentiate about 10 million colors at any given brightness, because its sensitive to brightness in a logarithmic fashion the eye needs about 24 bits of per channel depth to see no banding.
Presumably this is for HDR. In the SDR space I don’t think you’d see the difference between 8 and 16bit. And the way it’s encoded is logarithmic so you can express the visible range with less bits where your eyes are less sensitive.