I’ve listened to many tech reviewers and photo editors saying that RAW images are better and have been intrigued by it. Also what are it’s merits and demerits?
In: Technology
The RAW images basically have no compression or image processing. Straight up raw byte values for each of the colours of each pixel direct from the sensor. Along with metadata and if your camera has a built in screen usually a thumbnail for that.
The downside is they are massive. If you have a 30 Megapixel DSLR, each picture is going to be some multiple of that depending on how many bytes per pixel it stores and how the sensor encodes its data. But at the most basic, you’d have 3 bytes per pixel so 30 Megapixel ~ 90 MBytes per image. And once you get to massive image size, not only is storage space an issue (less so now that 100+ GB flash storage is a thing), the storage _speed_ becomes an issue. Unless you have lots of onboard RAM that can store dozens of sequential exposures, how fast you can write the data to it becomes an issue. This is what separates a consumer from a pro DSLR camera that is capable of doing 15 frames per second in a multi-exposure like for sports photography, its memory cache and data handling speeds that can keep up with such a ludicrous data rate.
Upside is it has absolutely no processing, smoothing, image correction or anything. Its straight from the sensor, so it really is a true representation of what you viewed through the viewfinder.
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