Dealing with IMAQ saving 12 bit images as 16 bit

[User002]

I'm trying to get an image of a CCD camera which has a depth of 12 bit. I read on the forums here that it is stored as 16 bit. I am however curious as to what this means: are the values of the image scaled? So is like a value of 4095 scaled to be a value of 65535? And a value of 2047 scaled to a value of 32767?
Or does it leave the actual values of the pixels unchanged?

[srikrishnaNF]

Hi,

 May be the 12 bits are converted into 16 bits by augmenting 4 bits at the MSB side.

 I had the similar confusion but with a careful examination i got to know about ths.

Regards,

SrikrishnaNF

[ThiCop]

Hello,

Or in other words:

The actual pixel/integer values should stay the same.

You could consider this as a sort of zero-padding at the most significant side.

This example can help you understand the concept:
https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z0000019MAjSAM&l=en-US

Just have a look at the maximum and minimum values that are being generated in the 2D array.