In SEM work, it's not that 99.9% of PIXELS exist between GL64 and 192. Instead,
there's a distribution of electron counts (current?), and some bloke arbitrarily
decided to make 64 the min and 192 the max. Why didn't they decide to make it
like GL32 and 224?   I can say with some authority that failure to use the full
grey scale range in SEM work in in many cases cause one to lose information that
is present in the imaging conditions. I'm finding it annoying that people write
auto contrast brightness routines that throw away information.

My theory is that the set of aesthetically pleasing images which look good on
properly calibrated monitors will all have a similar histogram. Saying
"calibrate your monitor" while leaving out a "calibrate your aesthetics" allows
a human subjectivity to mess it all up again. Some blokes won't know (I'm not
sure I do and I'll say I'm median intelligence here) who much to lighten up dark
scenes or use appropriate contrast, etc. Just use the full range. If course
there will be artistic choices here, and my guess is they'll boil down to
choices between broad or bimodal distributions.

I would guess that when you write an algorithm for a digital camera to chose
exposure time, you'd just leave the shutter open long enough to hit some target
RGB value. Same in raytracing: keep upping the light color's RGB values until
you've used the full range.

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