Nitpicking correction: The sensors give you a fixed number of bytes per pixel, like 10 or 12 bits per pixel. This are unsigned integers, not floats.

Typically you want to pack them to avoid storing 30% of zeros. So often the bytes need unscrambling.

Any sometimes there is a dark offset: In a really dark area of an image, random noise around zero can also go negative a little. You don't want to clip that off, and you don't want to use signed integers. So there typically is a small offset.