Sony A7R IV A7R4 Raw files compressed or uncompressed

[drb]

when shooting in RAW does the uncompressed file give a noticeable increase in quality over the compressed file?

 

[Uncle Kevriano]

when shooting in RAW does the uncompressed file give a noticeable increase in quality over the compressed file?

Nope! Seriously, I can't see any difference at all on any shot, regardless of how far I blow it up. I'd rather keep the 10fps shooting, because it drops to around 6'5-7 in uncompressed, and it buffers massively.

 

[DMoncla]

I just got my Riv but I'm shooting in compressed for the 10fps. 12bit depth is still fantastic. Where you could possibly see it is in a massively changing colorful image where you need more shades of one color and dithering appears. I'd guess your monitor will run out of bit depth before your image does unless you have one that displays true color like the newer apple displays and some very high end monitors.

 

[Bryan Carroll]

I'm looking at getting an a7r4 (tired of waiting on the a74). I shoot mostly landscape, some wildlife and some portrait. Would landscape need the uncompressed raws, or will compressed be just fine and it would be hard to tell too much difference (I'm not blowing images up huge). I think my NAS will hate the huge files

 

[DMoncla]

I'm looking at getting an a7r4 (tired of waiting on the a74). I shoot mostly landscape, some wildlife and some portrait. Would landscape need the uncompressed raws, or will compressed be just fine and it would be hard to tell too much difference (I'm not blowing images up huge). I think my NAS will hate the huge files

My personal oppinion would be to take landscapes in regular raw. I'm only using compressed for the FPS. Will you notice much of a difference? Probably not. But there will be a few shots that the uncrompressed just might save your ass from losing the work you put in. 12 bit depth of compressed Raw is still a lot of information though.

 

[AlphaWorld]

I just got my Riv but I'm shooting in compressed for the 10fps. 12bit depth is still fantastic. Where you could possibly see it is in a massively changing colorful image where you need more shades of one color and dithering appears. I'd guess your monitor will run out of bit depth before your image does unless you have one that displays true color like the newer apple displays and some very high end monitors.

The compressed RAW format is not 12 bits - I'm not sure where this misconception comes from. Maybe that was a previous algorithm?

The decompressed data is still 14 bits. but there is some loss of fine detail in blocks where there is a wide range between the minimum and maximum values for a channel. The worst is an edge between black and white, for example.

 

[pointreyes]

The posterization in the lossy compressed raw can happen - it did to me, I lost a photo due to it. I could not understand what happened to a shot of the moon I took and on further research I found the following: https://stephenbayphotography.com/blog/sony-raw-compression-artifacts-real-examples/ . What he experienced is what I experienced. Most of the time I'm fine with using lossy compressed raw - I don't crop heavily which probably helps a little.

 

[AlphaWorld]

The posterization in the lossy compressed raw can happen - it did to me, I lost a photo due to it. I could not understand what happened to a shot of the moon I took and on further research I found the following: https://stephenbayphotography.com/blog/sony-raw-compression-artifacts-real-examples/ . What he experienced is what I experienced. Most of the time I'm fine with using lossy compressed raw - I don't crop heavily which probably helps a little.

I have a fondness for heavy cropping, which is why I use uncompressed RAW files. I use 128GB cards, so I get just over 1000 images to a card (If I ever fill it!). I often crop a 10Mp piece out of the 60Mp frame, occasionally even smaller (you need a sharp lens to do that, and make sure Ziggy isn’t watching )