I made professional magazine covers in JPEG a couple of times, and i never do normal travel pics in RAW. With the amount of photos i make i’d need gigantic storage. Now i have a 18 TB RAID 6 with 12 TB effective storage and anyway; for all normal purposes JPEG Fine – is fine, for me. m
PS: if i really needed RAW, i still have a P7000 Coolpix that does it. But really, if i want that kind of quality, I’ll take the D4 and one of those ED lenses …
Read what expert Ken Rockwell thinks about this:
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/raw.htm
Nice idea, but i think it’s too expensive for what it can do. No?
Flyer59 – I agree re RAW for the reasons you give.
My view is based on “convergence” i.e. if I am going to haul around a camera I want it to be good enough for everything I want to do, and that includes aviation photography which nearly always has the haze issue, and de-hazing works a lot better in RAW. I would never keep pics long-term in RAW, because
– cannot be read by anything older than a couple of years)Basically if you kept stuff in DNG, you will be consigned to upgrading the display software regularly, which especially Adobe will love, with their new online-only model at about a tenner a month! Which IMHO will fuel the market for bootleg versions of the latest pre-online-only ones, but eventually people will want new features and isn’t it going to be difficult to generate cracked installation packages from a download-only facility?
I think some of Ken Rockwell’s comments are outdated. Yes you will fill up a 8GB card fast but nobody will go around with a half decent camera with an 8GB card. Also, while “100% jpeg” should be close enough to RAW for most jobs, the reality is that when you open jpeg in Photoshop or Lightroom, a number of the functions are missing.
David’s link (the DXO) looks great. I saw something similar but bigger and probably better in a Sony shop; they have been doing it for ages. It clips onto an Iphone. The DXO also appears to be Iphone-only. Thankfully it has a shutter button on top.
I wish Moore’s law was true for photographic sensors as well. But it appears not overly much has happened to photosensors for years now. Despite ultrapixels, pureview, 1.5μ pixels etc… they are only incremental steps and certainly not exponential.
I’m not sure that’s quite true. My Canon 5D Mk 1 goes up to 6400 ISO; the latest Mk III goes up to 102400 – 16 times faster. Everything else – noise, dynamic range etc… is all better.
The first digital camera I used was a Monochrome Kodak DCS 200 which cost 8000 pounds about 17 years ago. Any modern phone is likely to beat it hands down in terms of the sensor.
Still waiting for a breakthrough in sensor technology that allows my tiny sensor iPhone or compact camera to deliver stunning low-light performance………….
I don’t tend to think that’ll happen as dSLR sensors are now hitting physical limits, the most fundamental of which is shot noise due to the limited number of photons that hit each sensor site during an exposure. However good the electronics get, this will always represent a hard limit on how well a small sensor can perform in low light. The only way past this would be innovations in optics, to get more light to the sensor in the first place.
In any case, any improvements to phone sensorw would likely be applied to the DSLRs. The only way you’ll win is if you get to the point, akin to computing, where a reasonable person acknowledges that they simply don’t need anything better. I’m typing this on a computer that’s 5 years old. Unless I want to edit photos, it’s just as good as my partner’s brand new computer. I suspect that for many people, phones have already reached this point.
One way forward would be to dramatically improve the motion stabilisation, so that handheld exposures of say 1 second were possible, against the present 1/50 or so.
Obviously that won’t work with a subject which itself changes e.g. people 
Yes, some of Ken’s comments are a little old, I agree! But in general I think the same, for 99% of all photos RAW is not worth it … And when I read that even Nation Geographic photographers use JPEGs ….
I think one needs to heavily qualify that…
If you take a load of pics and need to adjust almost every one of them (I mean in exposure, haze, etc, not just cropping) then RAW and Lightroom is most professionals’ choice. The final result is batch-output to jpeg.
If you just take a load of pics to use as-is, jpeg is perfectly good enough.
So everybody uses jpeg really
It is a waste of a €2000 camera+lens to chuck away the RAW output. Even if you do no adjustments, the jpeg output from a decent PC converter (Lightroom, Photoshop, ACDSEE, etc) is better than what the camera will do.
Some of this stuff is of interest to me because (unrelated to aviation) I am shooting a wedding this summer and am currently updating the workflow I will use, because I’ve not done a wedding since I moved from Aperture to Lightroom a while back. Peter, what functions aren’t available in Lightroom if you’ve shot JPEG rather than RAW? Leaving aside that a function like minimising noise is probably better done against an image that hasn’t had it done in the camera already but perhaps not quite as you want it aside, I haven’t found any functions in Lightroom which will operate on RAW but not on a JPEG.
Even if you do no adjustments, the jpeg output from a decent PC converter (Lightroom, Photoshop, ACDSEE, etc) is better than what the camera will do.
This isn’t my experience testing the newest (Nikon) SLRs.
I did a 2-day Lightroom course (the one I won in that hilarious photo competition 3rd prize ) but most of it has escaped my brain since… the Blacks function was the main one of relevance to me that was available only to RAW. But that’s not relevant to ground based photography where haze is usually not an issue. There were numerous other functions and the lecturer went through them.
Re RAW to JPG conversion, the main issue is probably that the top jpeg quality setting on DSLRs is not anywhere near what the PC software calls “100%”. For example my Pentax K3 produces files of the order of 10MB but if I convert the DNG to “100% jpeg” I get about 30MB. Whether the difference is visible to the naked eye with the image filling the monitor is a different Q; of course it isn’t. A 5MB jpeg looks the same as a 100MB jpeg, at that level. But if you zoom in 1:1 and look at some suitable detail, especially with sharp line boundaries (vegetation is a pretty hard test for jpeg) then you can see it. Then it comes down to deciding what is good enough for permanent storage. Normally I don’t bother (and use the ex-camera jpeg) but if it was a trip somewhere specially scenic then I do editing/cropping etc and convert to 100% jpeg. I suspect the DSLR (and better camera phone) makers avoid generating jpegs which non-anorak users cannot email to somebody and would overwhelm their support forums
On that course, everybody else was a “pro” photographer (well, they all thought paying £10/month to Adobe was a brilliant deal ) and since the bottom has fallen out of the “industrial photography” business with everybody being able to get a great camera (or so people think) all of them were doing mainly weddings. They said Lightroom is brilliant for that sort of thing because if the bride’s dress is just 0.01% the wrong shade of white (or whatever colour it was) they get into massive trouble, and with LR they can fix up all 300 photos in one go.
