Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Top 5 Reasons People Don't Shoot RAW – Part 1

Years ago when my friend Mark told me that he always shoots RAW and recommended that I do the same, I just didn’t get it. My objections/excuses were:
  1. Memory cards with enough capacity to store RAW files are too expensive.
  2. Hard drives with enough capacity to store RAW files are too expensive.
  3. Software required to process RAW files is too expensive.
  4. RAW files would complicate my post-processing workflow.
  5. JPEG files are probably as good as RAW anyway.
Here's how I respond to those same objections today:

Excuse #1 - Memory cards are too expensive
Before our trip to New York in April of this year, Adorama (which I’ve always wanted to visit) had Sandisk Extreme Pro 16GB SDHC UHS-1 45MB/s cards for sale for $69 USD. At the time, Vistek and Henry’s in Toronto either didn’t have them, or were selling them for a lot more money. I bought two at Adorama for under $150 CAD.

Yesterday I saw that both Henry’s and Vistek are selling what I believe is the same card for $79.99. My 16.2MP D7000 has two card slots, so with two of these cards installed, I can store over 600 images saved in both RAW and JPEG Fine formats!

Of course you can get away with less expensive cards (I wanted the class 10 cards recommended for the HD video on the D7000).

Top 5 Reasons People Don't Shoot RAW – Part 2

1 comment:

  1. Yes, memory costs have come down. I bought a 16Gb memory card lately at about $23 which is half of the cost of the same capacity card a couple of years ago.

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