>>> No.
>>> If you output as PPM or PNG, you can have from 5 up to 16 bits per 
>>> chanel integer values.
>>> PNG offers good compression.
>>> PNG can also have an alpha chanel of the same lenght as the colour 
>>> chanels.
>>> At some time, there was RAW and DMP, but they were discarted as 
>>> obsolete. They were still integer based.
>>
>> MegaPOV can output HDR-images, aren't those float-based?
>>
>> cu!
> I don't use MegaPov. Yes, HDR is, and need to be, float based. It's also, 
> in my view, the only reason you may need, or want, float based image data.

It's just useful to be able to change the brightness/contrast/gamma after a 
long render without having to re-render or see lots of artifacts.  Also 
useful to do post-process effects like bloom, where having knowledge of 
colours outside the 0-255 range is needed.

If you know a little C it is pretty trivial to modify one of the simple 
image writing routines in the POV source (eg BMP format) to output floats 
instead of the integers.  Or just use MegaPOV as suggested.

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