I have been shooting RAW only with Canon 20D, 5D, 5DMkII for the last 7 years.
During that time I have never felt the need to use JPG at all, and have benefitted over the years with steadily improving RAW processing engines, so my 20D shots look 3 or 4 generations better now than they did when I first took them. Obviously that would not have been possible with JPGs.
However - I find myself reconsidering this strategy with the X100:
1.a. There is no clear current IQ benefit to using the RAW file v Fuji's JPG. The Fuji engine is excellent and I cannot improve upon it with ACR - indeed sometimes struggle to even match it, and certainly cannot get close with Silkypix.
1.b. Maybe there is more headroom for highlight recovery from a RAW file, but it's really not clear. I would expect this to be the case. But if I use Auto-DR mode with JPG then that's probably a solution that is just as good or even better.
1.c. Auto White balance on the Fuji is unbelievably good. If it's this good in camera then the safety net provided by RAW is much less useful.
2. Write times were never a problem with the Canon DSLRs; the buffer was large and the camera always responsive, and for my style of shooting I very seldom had to wait for the camera. However with the X100 simply writing a 5mb jpg file v a 20mb raw file makes the camera significantly more responsive in use.
So at the moment I would obtain a benefit by shooting JPG - a more responsive camera. The only negative is that possibly in the future the RAW processing engines will become better than the current Fuji engine. But the existing engine is so incredibly good that I cannot but see that the benefit must be very small.
So there is the trade-off a possible small future benefit against a very real current speed advantage.
AND OMG!! Maybe I see the point of the RAW button after all. They put it in because they knew their jpg engine was awesome. The RAW button is for those highly unusual situations where you think you might need to play with the WB or highlights, but for 99% of the time - just shoot jpg.
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X100 blog -> http://peri.org.uk/wp/?tag=blog
During that time I have never felt the need to use JPG at all, and have benefitted over the years with steadily improving RAW processing engines, so my 20D shots look 3 or 4 generations better now than they did when I first took them. Obviously that would not have been possible with JPGs.
However - I find myself reconsidering this strategy with the X100:
1.a. There is no clear current IQ benefit to using the RAW file v Fuji's JPG. The Fuji engine is excellent and I cannot improve upon it with ACR - indeed sometimes struggle to even match it, and certainly cannot get close with Silkypix.
1.b. Maybe there is more headroom for highlight recovery from a RAW file, but it's really not clear. I would expect this to be the case. But if I use Auto-DR mode with JPG then that's probably a solution that is just as good or even better.
1.c. Auto White balance on the Fuji is unbelievably good. If it's this good in camera then the safety net provided by RAW is much less useful.
2. Write times were never a problem with the Canon DSLRs; the buffer was large and the camera always responsive, and for my style of shooting I very seldom had to wait for the camera. However with the X100 simply writing a 5mb jpg file v a 20mb raw file makes the camera significantly more responsive in use.
So at the moment I would obtain a benefit by shooting JPG - a more responsive camera. The only negative is that possibly in the future the RAW processing engines will become better than the current Fuji engine. But the existing engine is so incredibly good that I cannot but see that the benefit must be very small.
So there is the trade-off a possible small future benefit against a very real current speed advantage.
AND OMG!! Maybe I see the point of the RAW button after all. They put it in because they knew their jpg engine was awesome. The RAW button is for those highly unusual situations where you think you might need to play with the WB or highlights, but for 99% of the time - just shoot jpg.
--
X100 blog -> http://peri.org.uk/wp/?tag=blog
