Digital Photo Format

[AliBaba]

Margus

Ooops this discussion is going on a lot of places, now it’s here as well.. :-))

First of all I never compare pictures on a screen. I take pictures to get them printed and the monitor and paper has different characteristic so…

It might be different over the world but here high end photo-CDs (or slide-scans) comes in TIF/PCD. JPG is mostly used by mail order developing (36 pics on a floppy or internet-download)

JPG is almost as good when the picture is “finished”. As you say “it's an logarithmic sensor where nonimportant data gets lost anyway.” That’s true, but the differences an eye can see depends on a lot of factors, when you adjust (eg light) the factors changes and the differences you couldn’t see might get visible – if you use JPG they are gone. If the eye had been linear then it would have worked, but as you said the eye is logarithmic.

The program that takes the raw-data and transfers them to a raw-file they are getting better all the time. If you store in JPG today you have stored in today’s JPG- technology. If you store it in RAW you can transfer it to next years JPG-technology, or next year…


Let’s say that time will show that one of us are wrong about what’s the best… I can store my pictures in JPG anytime, you can never get back…
We don’t know what we will expect of our digital pictures in ten years time but I remember some years ago 480*640 was great and 256 colors was more then you ever would need so I can’t see why there is a good idea to reduce the amount of information in a picture.

It’s a difficult, but interesting, choice :-))