So ISO 100 sooc JPG is fine and equal to what processing from Raw can do. Anything higher and Raw will be better?
No with the right software raw will always be better .
But you don't even use raw
no I don’t need to.
I guess with Nikon software it's the same especially at ISO 100.
of course Nikon software is similar to what’s in the jpeg engine but remember it has some extra as it covers even pro model cameras not just point and shoots
and a big problem I have with raw is I need small file sizes, I have two hard drives and both of them are usually 90% full, I always keep deleting older images to make room for new ones. raw files also take forever to transfer from my card to the computer. I tested this too. With M43, a 32 GB card full of all jpg took 15 minutes to transfer and the same card full of raw+jpg took 1 hr and 10 min to transfer. Yuck. I wouldn't even use raw with M43 except I need to because I use it for astrophotography and some challenging dynamic range imaging (like when taking pictures of rainbows which we often get here near sunset.)
External hard drives are cheap and a great way of keeping your pc drive clear to improve speed and performance.
I download my cards after every photo session, it keeps the download times to a minimum and helps keep the camera performance at its best .
Nothing worse than powering up and having to wait while your camera reads through a ton of images to find the next clear sector
are external hard drives more reliable than they once were? I went through a period where I owned 3 external hard drives in 5 years, they would always either break down or file transfers would always stop mid transfer and in one case the computer refused to power the drive (the other two had their own power connectors directly to mains.)
Yes, an external mechanical hard drive can exhibit that behavior (the copying speed stays very low like 50-100KB/s for a while (can be a long while) because the computer somehow gives very little electricity to the USB port). If that happens, you have to wait, or probably power the external HDD with another power source. I have a Seagate 4TB Expansion external HDD so I know that. I also have a SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable external SSD and it doesn't have this problem.
For internal drives, I have a 256GB Liteon SSD that came with my Dell XPS 8900 in 2016 and serves as an Windows 10 OS disk, a 1TB Samsung 860 EVO that serves as a data disk which includes all my photos taken, and a 4TB Seagate HDD for data backup. Internal HDDs don't have the low-copying-speed problem above.
Right now I have one 500 GB PCIe NVMe M2 SSD and one 2 TB regular hard drive.
Excellent idea about downloading the images before the card is full! Do you then reformat the card in camera after every session even when the card isn't full yet and after downloading the images?
After unloading each photo session from my P1000 SD card to my computer, I put the SD card back to the P1000 and use the P1000's "Delete All Photos" command to clear the card (instead of reformatting). My card is a 128GB Kingston blue card (190MB/s read, 90MB/s write).
