POV already supports at least one true 16-bit image format: PNG.
I think TIFF support would be a nice addition, though.  Maybe
I'll see what's involved.

The problem with any sort of code that would access the image
when the information was needed is that many image formats,
including PNG and GIF, are not particularly conducive to being
read out of order.  That's probably part of why BMRT and PRMAN 
use TIFF images as maps.  We could perhaps get away with using 
TGA or BMP images, both of which have common uncompressed formats 
that could be used effectively enough to access images by blocks
(though BMP isn't supported on non-Windows ports of POV.)  The 
actual modifications probably wouldn't be too drastic.

And yes, this would directly affect the "displacement mapping" 
that's being done with isosurfaces, though perhaps not in a
good way.  The problem is that isosurfaces use a binary chop
sort of method to find the intersection.  Any normal caching
scheme would throw up its virtual hands in despair when 
confronted with the resulting access pattern.

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