Skywalker
Heliman
Location: West Kentucky
| In my personal experience, It depends on your camera and your needs.
We typically shoot stills with two cameras, a 4 mp Sony dsc-85 and a 6 mp Cannon D-60. With the Sony, there is ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERRENCE in picture quality (grain and noise) between shooting jpeg with the least compression and in tif mode. The only thing that changes is the file size. It goes from about 2meg to 10meg with tif! I'm not saying the pictures are perfect with the Sony, but they just don't get any better when you shoot in tif mode. We have made enlagements to 16 x 20 with jpegs from the Sony with no problems.
With the Cannon, however, there is an appreciable difference (in grain and noise) when shooting in raw mode. Consequently, we've got some big 'ol flash cards and snap away in raw mode. Granted a jpeg shot with the Cannon will always look better than one shot with the Sony, but when we break out the big boy, we want the BEST.
I don't know if the differrence is do to different compression software between the two manufactures or if you need a whole gob of pixels (over 4 mil) to start to notice the flaws in the jpeg format? Either way it should be easy for you to test your camera and see for yourself.
Take a couple of pics (in each mode) of the horizon with the camera on a tripod (to eliminate possible vibration variations). The differrence in noise and grain will be easy to spot on the blue or grey sky between shots.
Keep in mind that just because you can see a subtle differrence zoomed way in in Photoshop, doesn't mean you'll ever see it in all but the biggest of enlargments.
Hope this helps
Michael |
