title: What is the BMP format for Gray scale Images?
body: <p>What is the BMP format for Gray scale Images (especially for 16 bit per pixel) ? 
  The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMP_file_format" rel="nofollow noreferrer">wikipedia</a> just talks about colour images for bmp.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Update:</strong></p>
  
  <p>Just for an update and information for future visitors, I am going for <a href="http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pgm.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">PGM</a> as this is uncompressed and can support 16 bit gray-scale.  Another option was to use <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics" rel="nofollow noreferrer">PNG</a>, but it compresses the data (which is not what I want) as discussed <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11099931/trying-to-extract-pixel-values-from-a-given-png-image">here</a> .
   Also note that the image may appear distorted, since most of the monitors support 256 colors and not 4096 for 16 bit. So the Image will be saturated.</p>
  
  <p>It was though surprising to know that BMP is <em>almost</em> helpless in case of Gray-scale for 16 bit images.<br>
  Thanks for people who helped me understand the issue. </p>