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Sony RX1rII in the RAW

To compress or to uncompress? That is the question.

Since I starting shooting with the RX1rII I’ve always had the format firmly set to uncompressed RAW on the (not unreasonable) assumption that though my memory cards might now hold only half the images, my disk drive is constantly full, and my post-processing time is twice as long, for an IQ gain, however marginal, it has to be worth it, right?

But for my upcoming trip to Nepal and 10 day trek to Everest Base Camp, I’ll need to squeeze as many shots as humanly possible onto each memory card and can’t waste valuable power reviewing, editing and deleting images. It was time to test the (not unreasonable) assumption and so I stole off into Leeds for 40 minutes of shooting, using both compressed and uncompressed formats.

The result? Absolutely no difference in IQ whatsoever. The only way I could tell which were which was the load times in Lightroom. The test might have been quick, and might have been unscientific, but for me it’s absolutely conclusive. I’ll head of to Nepal with the format set to compressed and happy that the resulting images might be half the size, but every bit the equal of their uncompressed brethren.

But it does leave one question, what the hell are those other 40 gigabytes doing?


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Compressed



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Compressed



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Uncompressed



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Uncompressed



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Compressed



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Uncompressed


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Compressed



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Uncompressed



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Compressed



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Compressed


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Uncompressed



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Compressed



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Uncompressed


Shooting notes

All shots were taken hand held in Aperture mode. Post processing adjustments in Lightroom were exactly the same  (copy settings) for each pair of images except when taking into account different shutter speeds and therefore exposures.

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