lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

That is a curious point. But it could be similar to changing zones in AA's original Zone System with changes in development or Gamma. Compressing a zone to be say not a full stop or factor of 2 but say 1.67 Of a stop. Then more will fit in 14 stops or in digital tones in 255 tones. In AA's old editions of his Negative Book he showed development to more than 10 zones, but the actual density on the film was still not clipping or burnt out. Confusing to say the least but it actually makes more sense to me with digital media or files. 2^14 = 16,384, more than 255! 1.5^14 = 292. Though actually I think digital shades of grey are more like area or light though a stop than a simple multiple of two. The math and physics of this is not so straight forward. I did some extensive research on it a couple years ago but forget how to explain it. It did in the end make sense and is what AA was doing to his film and less dynamic ranged printing materials.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

I think I understand your points (and I am a zone system fan), but in this case there is no transposition to a different lower resolution media. The DXO Mark is supposedly measuring just the sensor system response and unlike AA’s negative, which can be examined separately from the DR of the print, the only way we can examine the data from the sensor is to look at the digitized data array, and you simply cannot have more DR than the resolution of the digitizer. In fact, in the real world, there is usually several bits less.

So to clarify, the dynamic range is bounded on the high end when you set the MSB (most significant bit) of the digitizer and on the low end, by the aperture uncertainty of the digitizer (the LSB can always bounce between 0 and 1, so a 14 bit A/D at best, has a resolution of 13-1/2 bits) and noise, both that introduced ny the sensor (typically shot noise) and the noise introduced by the the amplifier between the sensor and the A/D. Therefore, in even the best digitizing systems, the DR is determined by the accuracy of the entire digitizing chain, and that is always less than the theoretical ideal (in this case, 14 bits). Make sense?

Petesfixit Loc: Houston Texas

There's a lot of great info here, but let me add my 2 cents also, something that wasn't already addressed : correct light metering. I don't want to sound like a know-it-all, but at least for me With negative film there's an inbuilt tendency to compress the highlights, they are hard to blow out, and so by leaning exposure towards the shadows, we make sure there's adequate light there , and so all important details are preserved. Alternatively with digital sensors, we correctly expose for the highlights, avoiding blow out, and shadows can generally be recovered in RAW

halraiser

What model Canon do you have? Mine has a high dynamic range (HDR) mode that takes three images, then combines them to deal with that problem. A tripod is obviously helpful so you don't move the camera between shots.