On Thu, 13 Nov 2003, Shel Belinkoff wrote: > Is this important to know? Will knowing this make for better > photographs? If so, in what way? > > If a Pentax RAW file is essentially a TIFF (as I understand your > comment), and Pentax doesn't much compress their RAW files (per comments > on a digital camera review site), what is the advantage of using RAW > over TIFF? I believe you mentioned that RAW allows for greater color > depth (bit depth ... you know what I mean) but couldn't that be done > with a TIFF file as well?
The TIFF files produced by the *ist D are 8 bit and have full RGB at every pixel. The RAW files are 16 bits (only 12 are used) and still have the colors of the bayer array (25% red, 50% green, 25% blue). The TIFF files have already gone through the bayer interpolation algorithm and have had white balance applied. RAW is better and smaller, so there really isn't much point to using TIFF on this camera. alex
