In message ,
Alan Browne wrote:

Quantization noise is further disguised in character, of course, by the
conversion from bayer to RGB.

Not if you look directly at the RAW data.

Demosaicing and white-balancing certainly hide a multitude of
quantization sins. If a camera had no CFA, and was greyscale, then an
8-bit Tiff with a 2.2-gamma-adjusted output from a greyscale RAW file
would have values of something like 0, 9, 16, 20, 22, etc, in the
deepest shadows, with nothing in-between. The WB and demosaicing create
all kinds of intermediate values that fool a histogram, but doesn't have
quite the shadows that it could, if the camera's sensor "sensed" in a
gamma-adjusted (and already white-balanced) manner.
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John P Sheehy