RAW -vs- s/mRAW -vs- CS4

[musicaleCA]

I understand that musicaleCA owns a couple of 7D cameras, but does not have experiecne with full-frame cameras,and he might be blinded by his new love, the 7D. But from what I have been able to glean from Fred Miranda's many dual-camera owners, the remarkable performance of the 5D-II's reduced size RAW captures is *not* carrying over to the 7D's reduced captures,especially those shot at higher ISO settings.

Naw. If you read my previous comments, you'll note that I didn't say the end result was super purdy. At 6400 things aren't purdy no matter how you slice it on a 7D. Admirable for an APS-C format camera—quite amazing actually—but still icky. In my case, if I'm shooting that high, it's so far only been a case of "Crap, I really need a shot for the rag...er...6400!" No one cares about noise in an image that's going to be printed on charmin.

And, this is the part that irks many APS-C advocates, I think the lens/pixel density equation has already been maxed out with current lenses with the 7D. 17.6 million tiny pixels, in my opinion, are no match for even 12.3 or 12.8 million more-than double-sized pixels. The per-pixel noise level is better with the full-frame camera, and the color response seems richer at higher ISO's with the full-frame large-pixel cameras, and the performance of average- to mid-level professional lenses like the 17-55 f/2.8 IS Canon zoom seems to have been maxed out with the 17.6 million pixels crammed onto the 1.6x sensor size.

Totally right. You'll hear no argument from me there. The 7D pushes my best lenses to their limits (the 50/1.4—1.8 wouldn't stand a chance—, 24-70/2.8, 70-200/2.8, and 10-22/3.5-4.5). Those are all very high quality pieces of glass, and the fact that they're barely providing the resolution needed to render details well is saying something. If you have less, the 7D really isn't for you. And, that is one of the things that really makes me think that Canon is very much right when they say the 7D isn't a continuation of the XXD line-up. It's very much a professional's APS-C camera. Great for sports and nature for the extra reach and macro for the extra DoF, but I bet they were safely assuming that the people who're serious about this camera already had solid glass. But I can understand how any fashion, studio, portrait, or wedding photographer would want to shoot themselves in the foot holding a 7D. The camera isn't for them.

The last consideration about the 7D sRAW and mRAW formats is that Lightroom/ACR can't convert them yet. That's the deal-breaker for me, and thus once I figured that out (the hard, hard way), I didn't shoot a single sRAW or mRAW frame thereafter.

Oh, and as for Garbz' comment about the 2-5min business, well, in the case of a photojournalist, if later WB correction is a necessity, smaller formats make a heck of a lot of sense, if you're filing in the field. That 3 min difference can be a whole lot of time; that's 3 minutes in which you could have them flagged and emailed to your editor in.

Total digression from this thread: A little anecdote regarding the 7D. I was shooting nighttime soccer/football tonight. Downloading the photos right now, actually. As many know, low-light sports photography is one of the most demanding subjects in photography on one's gear. It's utter hell, frankly, made worse if you don't have very good gear. Well, a photog I've met a few times was there, and was shooting with his 1D MkII. He stopped shooting; there wasn't enough light to get a decent exposure on the field—I take it—and the corners were even worse (about a 1-2 stop difference, depending on the corner).

But here's the rub: The 1D MkII has a sensor sensitivity of 100-1600. The 7D has a sensor sensitivity of 100-6400. On manual exposure, I set my camera to ISO 3200, 1/320, f/3.2, opening up aperture and shutter by 1/3 each when in the corners. That one stop of extra sensor sensitivity was the difference in getting a shot that was workable and not. (The less said about the 1D MkIII the better; he, like many others, are not fans of the AF on that beast and with good reason.)

So the moral? Big deal that my 7D's give me noise at higher ISOs. Sure, small detail is pretty borked, even if I managed to freeze motion at such a slow shutter speed (1/320 is very slow for soccer...grrrr). But, I could keep shooting without fighting like mad against the light, and sometimes that makes all the difference. The camera just has to work. How well is something debatable after the fact. (All that said I don't care; printed on charmin. Meh.)

 

[Garbz]

As to Garbz's point; regarding storage. I would ask why if as he says, "space is not free but it is cheap, LUDICROUSLY cheap" then why he does not walk the walk he talks and keep his RAW files??? If space is "LUDICROUSLY cheap," as he puts it, then why be content with keeping a mere 8-bit JPEG image when he could be archiving 12-bit or 14-bit (real data) raw files? Seems a bit of a disconnect. Having been at this myself since the early days of d-slr photograhy, I have seen a few absolutely MAJOR advancements in image processing software, such as the invention of D-Lighting AKA FIll-Light optimization in software, Highlight Recovery software, the Adobe Camera RAW software application, the Lightroom speed advantage landmark, and the quick-masking technologies developed by Nik Software and first used in Nikon Capture with the Control Point Technology, and now sold as Viveza; this is a technology the folks at Adobe have tried to imitate, but can not yet equal, especially in terms of ease and speed of use.

Again, if storage space is "LUDICROUSLY cheap," I would think a fellow who can afford $100 terabyte drives galore ought to see the value of saving 12- or 14-bit data, unless of course he has not been involved in digital imaging long enough to have seen how crude software and computers were nine or ten years ago, and who doesn't have first hand experience of how the sudden development of tremendously better software can breathe entirely new life into archives of older, 12-bit RAW images shot just seven or eight years ago. With 8-bit JPEGS, the majority of the information is thrown out. RAW files are your digital negatives! Keeping JPEGs only is tantamount to keeping only 4x6 color prints, but throwing away the negatives, due to lack of space to store said negatives. I mean, we have ludicrously cheap storage,right? Why not keep the negatives,and make new prints as needed?

Same reason I don't keep old magazines, or deleted all simulation data from thesis, I won't read them again. What part of "I don't re-edit old files" did you not understand? Given I don't have the time to edit the 8000 or so RAWs currently sitting in my Lightroom database I really couldn't care less if a advancement makes an old file of mine suddenly look awesome. The same goes for negatives. I have rheems of negatives that I never once went back and thought, hmmm maybe if I printed them like this... I make changes till I am happy with, and archive, move on. I even considered throwing them out last time I moved, but stopped when I remembered that prints fade, but negatives don't.

The JPEGs to me are a 13"x9.5" @300dpi print that never fades and just because space is ludicrously cheap doesn't mean it should be thrown out.

I don't have time to re-edit old stuff, nor the willpower. It doesn't matter how much post processing changes, my photography has gotten better at a much faster rate and I would much rather dedicate the time to my newer better pictures, than my older worse pictures. So why should I keep all this wasteful data?

I think we are on separate pages. 2 minutes instead of 5 minutes to transfer off of the memory card is not the issue....its the sum of all data being backed up. My current means is Firewire, which on my next build will probably become external SATA. Regardless, my current backup seems to around an hour per drive, and I have only just begun shooting in RAW. Transfer rates cannot increase fast enough IMO.

... Is this a backup solution or are you copying files? I use a small utility called CopyTo to synchronise (only copy new/changed files and delete extra files on target) my photos along with a lot of other data on a backup harddisk over a slow network (6MB/s max) and it doesn't take more than a good 15 minutes.
/EDIT: Nevermind just realised this is a pointless reply since I archive JPEGs

Oh, and as for Garbz' comment about the 2-5min business, well, in the case of a photojournalist, if later WB correction is a necessity, smaller formats make a heck of a lot of sense, if you're filing in the field. That 3 min difference can be a whole lot of time; that's 3 minutes in which you could have them flagged and emailed to your editor in.

Admittedly I know only 2 photojournalists, and neither very well, but from what I have seen in the cases where time is not money, but rather life or death, they seem to shoot JPEG with auto white balance. But yes you're 100% right, although this is quite different photography to what I am talking about.

 

[musicaleCA]

Oh, and as for Garbz' comment about the 2-5min business, well, in the case of a photojournalist, if later WB correction is a necessity, smaller formats make a heck of a lot of sense, if you're filing in the field. That 3 min difference can be a whole lot of time; that's 3 minutes in which you could have them flagged and emailed to your editor in.

Admittedly I know only 2 photojournalists, and neither very well, but from what I have seen in the cases where time is not money, but rather life or death, they seem to shoot JPEG with auto white balance. But yes you're 100% right, although this is quite different photography to what I am talking about.

Oh man. If I were in a life/death situation trying to shoot like mad, I'd definitely just go auto-wb and JPEG too. Probably auto everything. At that point, the point is that you're there; not that you're there and making purdy images too.

And I HATE auto WB.