16 bit colour - does it really make a big difference? (1 Viewer)

Hello - it says in the specs for my Canon 500D that the raw image type is "14-bit Canon Original". Am I correct in assuming the obvious that this is a half-way-house between full 16-bit colour and the 8-bit colour that the jpegs are saved in? I alway shoot and process in raw and save my processed master files as 16-bit tiffs. When processing them in Photoshop I work in 16-bit colour.
If I am going to print a pic I print it from a 16-bit tiff file; if I am going to put it on the web (like in my gallery on BirdForum) I make a jpeg copy.
All other things being equal does it make a whole lot of difference to the final quality of the photograph working in 16-bit colour? What exactly is the quality advantage supposed to be with 16-bit colour? Just more colours?
Any help, advice, info would be most appreciated, kind regards Pete

The advantage is that if you apply curves corrections or any other correction that moves the tonal information around you just have more to play with. The Jpg you make for the web will only have 8 bits per channel, but those 8 bits can be chosen from a wider range of possibilities. If you have the histogram palette open and do so curves adjustments to an 8 bit image you will see that it often becomes comb like with fine peaks and troughs, in moving the tonal information around you are actually reducing the variation of tones in the image. If you do this in a 16 bit image you will still reduce the tonal variation but you so much more to play with.

As far as I'm aware 14 bit colour is the best you can get from a DSLR, so don't worry about those two extra bits, anyhow in Photoshop 16 bit colour only 15bits per channel are used for colour information, so it's only one bit really.