Scale the depth value between NUI_IMAGE_DEPTH_MINIMUM and NUI_IMAGE_DEPTH_MAXIMUM after left shift of NUI_IMAGE_PLAYER_INDEX_SHIFT. This mitigates the banding effect - bands are now on the order of 1-2 cm.
Use float range scaling in K2 SDK with an arbitrary constant. The fine depth is in there, but there is front-to-back wrapping in the depth range.
Add a hacky tweakbar control to adjust raw depth value scaling. The near range data is much clearer at low scaling values, but wraps. At USHRT_MAX-1 scaling, the whole depth range is included, but it looks flattened out.