i'm going to come at this from an armchair enthusiast w/very limited SD DV capture experience from many many years ago prior to Blu-Rays & 1080p techs.

1. 10bit capture seems possible nowadays.... how about anything higher?

i know there aren't any consumer playback devices beyond 10bit currently, i'm just purely speculating :).

removing the IO storage speeds/capacity, are there lens/digital capture systems capable of doing this?

2. even if it was... is 12-bit/16-bit "enough" to capture real life colors? i still think real life has more colors than what we can see reproduced on videos. still photography is getting very close...

thx guys!

10bit is enough to capture real life colors and should be sufficient for all but high end productions.