Nikon Z Series High Efficiency RAW Support

[mikae1]

@martinus

This leaves us with the conundrum: should we use the high-efficiency RAW files in the field and convert back to DNG on our system, or should we just go for the full-size lossless RAW?

In camera lossless proprietary raw and wait for DNG v1.7 files with lossless JPEG XL compression to be supported in darktable, would be my advice.

[paperdigits (Mica)]

@martinus

But it seems (after reading numerous articles) that it is visually identical and the processing capabilities don’t seem to change.

Of course that is what they tell you. For me, personally, the point of a raw file is that I get unadulterated data from the camera sensor, as much as possible. So using a lossy compression format on a raw file just does not compute for me. I also don’t need the extra frames-per-second that this lossy format was developed to enable, so its pretty much useless to me.

@martinus

It is a pity that camera vendors don’t release libraries to decode the files.

Well Nikon licensed this compression technology from a 3rd party vendor, so there must be something special in it, I guess. It is patented up the yingyang, so it seems unlikely that it’ll be supported by FOSS raw processors any time soon.

@martinus

This leaves us with the conundrum: should we use the high-efficiency RAW files in the field and convert back to DNG on our system, or should we just go for the full-size lossless RAW?

For me that’s easy: I use the format supported by the FOSS community, this gives me the most assurance now and into the future that I’ll be able to read and process my raw files.

[martinus]

@paperdigits

Of course that is what they tell you. For me, personally, the point of a raw file is that I get unadulterated data from the camera sensor, as much as possible. So using a lossy compression format on a raw file just does not compute for me. I also don’t need the extra frames-per-second that this lossy format was developed to enable, so its pretty much useless to me.

Well, it is not only Nikon telling, I have read many articles that seem to verify the claim. You maybe don’t need the speed. But there are types of photography where the speed matters. So in some situations I am willing to trade of maybe fraction of image quality versus speed because that gives me the shot.