D200, uncompressed raw, hi isos

[jcdoss]

What is the concensus opinion on uncompressed raw and high isos when shooting with the D200? I have been shooting exclusively compressed raw, and have become curious about whether or not image quality would improve if I switched to uncompressed at ISO 800 and above?

What are your experiences?

 

[Gale]

Personally I see no difference

 

[misupix]

Don't know about high ISO, but I use uncompressed RAW.

It preserves the highlights much better, especially if you have to recover them :Crunk: like I usually have to do.....

 

[Nancy Elwood]

IMHO, no difference. And the space savings is huge.

Nancy

 

[Retief]

The only place I have seen a difference is in keeping some highlights, and that is pretty subtle. The biggest reason I see for shooting uncompressed is that you don't lose any information. Given the state of software, and how it evolves, next years versions will do a better job of digging information out of the data than today's, or yesterday's. The more data you have, the better chance you have of getting better results.

That being said, I shoot compressed far more often than uncompressed myself.

 

[seafoxfla]

I see no difference between uncompressed and compressed. I use compressed raw.

 

[JeffKohn]

I really wish Nikon would use lossless compression, there just isn't a valid reason not to IMHO. Losslessly-compressed NEF's would only be about 10% bigger than the current compressed files, which would still be a significant space savings over uncompressed NEF. This will be even more important going forward if they release a 20mp FF camera.

 

[Commodorefirst]

I shoot compressed Raw, High ISO from the d200 all the time, no difference in noise, only with highlights is there a difference and that can only be seen .009% of the time. In otherwords not a darn bit of difference for me and the way I process.

Cheers,

Wade

 

[jcdoss]

Thanks for all your replies! I don't see much of a difference either, but I was curious to know what those of you with eyes trained more than mine think. Glad to see you all agree!

 

[Gale]

Watch your histogram and blinkies and expose correctly...
Thats what we strive for

 

[agw0]

Hi,

I don't see a reason to shoot compressed raw at all - when I shoot raw, I want all the information in it I can get. If I don't mind lossy compression, than I switch to JPEG, and get not only smaller image sizes but also easier workflow and considerably larger in-camera buffer througput.

With capacity/price ration incresed by a factor of 2 for hard disks, and roughtly a factor of 4 for CF cards, both over the last 12 months, IMHO the file size argument for shooting compressed file formats is becoming pretty much irrelevant, at least for something like the 10MP of a D200.