# CRAW. — what is your take?



## BeenThere (Jul 30, 2020)

Ok, reading the R5 manual I see that CRAW is one of the capture file choices. Knowing nothing about it, I did a google search looking most for any downsides for using. The little that I found said that image quality is not much different from uncompressed RAW and file size is reduced by about 40% on average. If you do a double blind test of the same shot in RAW and CRAW, there are just perceivable differences viewing at 100%, and it would be hard to say which is better. With CFExpress memory cards being so damn expensive, I’m thinking about using CRAW as my primary capture file. Given all the experience available here on the forum I’m asking for any practical knowledge you can share. I am most interested in any image quality degradation you may or may not have seen. Thanks for your help.


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## JoTomOz (Jul 30, 2020)

BeenThere said:


> Ok, reading the R5 manual I see that CRAW is one of the capture file choices. Knowing nothing about it, I did a google search looking most for any downsides for using. The little that I found said that image quality is not much different from uncompressed RAW and file size is reduced by about 40% on average. If you do a double blind test of the same shot in RAW and CRAW, there are just perceivable differences viewing at 100%, and it would be hard to say which is better. With CFExpress memory cards being so damn expensive, I’m thinking about using CRAW as my primary capture file. Given all the experience available here on the forum I’m asking for any practical knowledge you can share. I am most interested in any image quality degradation you may or may not have seen. Thanks for your help.


Can’t say I’ve seen any downsides. Have had the R since launch and used it the whole time. In my (mostly long exposure) night photography I routinely push files pretty hard and can’t say I can see any difference. That being said, for that type of work I shoot RAW instead of CRAW. Just because for that the number of files is relatively small and the cost is small for me. But for everything else it is CRAW.


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## Sharlin (Jul 30, 2020)

The differences are so tremendously subtle that I don't really see any reason not to use CRAW. Especially given the yuge RAW sizes of the R5…


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## Frodo (Jul 30, 2020)

To repeat the others, I always shoot cRAW on the R and have failed to find any significant difference even when pixel peeping. Over the weekend I shot multiple exposures of the Milky Way for stacking. Those files get a really hard time and all were cRAW.


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## stevelee (Jul 31, 2020)

The difference may be small, but I wonder at paying thousands of dollars for a camera and not shooting for maximum quality, at least part of the time. I understand if you are running out of room on your cards and can't afford a spare because you blew all your cash on the camera. 

In 2002 I had my first digital camera. On an Alaskan cruise I had a 175MB (I think it was) IBM hard drive that fit in the card slot. I also had a 4MB card that came with the camera, for what that was worth. I was taking JPEGs but was afraid to take full 4MP shots all the time, so I limited that to just the most scenic pictures. I didn't have anything to download the pictures to while on the trip. Most of the pictures just wound up posted on the web, so no real problem. I would see CRAW as the 2020 version of that problem, and not nearly so restrictive as my Alaska experience.


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