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Comment by spekcular | Hacker News Reader

A lot of these features are nice to have but definitely not essential, especially for general amateur photography.

But here's one important feature the list misses: the ability to shoot uncompressed, or losslessly compressed, RAW images. The last time I checked, the introductory Sony cameras (the A6500 and its cousins) do not permit this. The customer can only access lossy compressed data. The same is true for lower-end Nikon DSLRs.

Most of the time, this is not a problem – though in some situations with heavy postprocessing or harsh lighting, you will certainly see compression artifacts. I just find it amazing that they're asking customers to pay almost a thousand dollars for a camera+lens kit that doesn't support lossless compression, or let me access the true "raw" data.

It's 2021! This is well-known technical knowledge taught in undergraduate CS classes.

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> A lot of these features are nice to have but definitely not essential, especially for general amateur photography.

While I agree with you, I feel like on a mirrorless, the Sensor Dust Protector Curtain is essential if you want to be able to change lenses while out in the field.

Many years ago I used to work for a small local paper, they gave me a DSLR so I had the luxury of the sensor being at least partially protected by the mirror. (I wish they gave me two bodies so I didn't have to swap lenses, but it was a small newspaper and they didn't have a lot of money).

Now I own a mirrorless (that I don't use professionally) and I would never attempt to change the lens unless I'm in an indoor, non-dusty room, without fans or a/c operating. Just looking at the naked sensor staring back at me makes me nervous ;-)

I can't imagine swapping lenses on the mirrorless while on assignments, I think I would have to resort to buying a couple of bodies just to avoid lens swapping.

The curtain protection would solve that problem.

I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. Sensors can be easily cleaned! I’ve changed lenses on my Fuji mirrorless in wind, dust, huddled under an umbrella, etc. On the one occasion in the past 5 years that dust spots were an issue in a photo, a quick few pixel clone stamp solved the problem.

For the average shooter, even one who uses their camera like a tool, maintaining it reasonably should make this a nonissue.

Yes if you use your camera as a hobbyist I agree with you. For professional use, the clone stamp solution is not going to work, as I explained in the sibling thread. In that case you would need to have your sensor professionally cleaned, which can be done relatively easily as you mentioned in the beginning of your comment, but costs money at least where I live (Sydney, Australia).

Maybe I'm less fussy than others, but I've never understood why people are so obsessed with making sure their sensor is spotless. If a dust spot is in a place it's easy to see in the resulting image, then it's trivial to remove it in post. If it's somewhere that's hard to remove, then it's not noticeable. Maybe my standards are low :)

Like in any field, when you go from hobby to doing it as a job, any trivial task becomes a problem if you have to repeat it dozens of times per month.

Perhaps you can create a macro to apply the same edit automatically to all your imported pictures. In a fast paced industry like news, that's still an unwelcome overhead though.

You don't have to create a macro. Any good photo editor will let you copy/paste an edit template on a thousand photos instantly.

I’m not familiar with edit templates, they would be ok as long as they can be stored for later reuse, this is because the typical workflow in news is that you don’t edit 300 photos all at once at the end of the month, it’s more like: you edit 10 photos every day, and sometimes you edit 5 of them at noon and another 5 at 6pm (numbers and times are made up obviously).

I would love to have a protection curtain like that on E-M5. But so far, it hasn't been essential. I routinely change lenses outdoors, and haven't had (or noticed!) a problem with dust on the sensor. I have a routine for doing the swap quickly, with minimal exposure of the sensor. It's obviously not watertight, but it seems okay. Although i do feel a bit like Dave Bowman re-entering the Discovery without his helmet on every time i do it ...

I wouldn't know what I would need that curtain for. But I am using Olympus cameras which have the strongest sensor cleaning avialable. Olympus also was the first brand to offer sensor cleaning and never gave up their lead.

Yeah good sensor cleaning minimises the issue but I feel like the curtain would remove the source of the problem altogether

It wouldn't. It would minimize it but it still happens with a curtain or DSLR.

That’s true I should have worded differently. What I meant is that I prefer preventing Vs taking care of it after the fact

> The customer can only access lossy compressed data

Honest question - is this a tech or a biz decision? I.e., is it more expensive to include output to raw? More i/o requirements or totally different chipsets or the like? Or is "raw" just deemed a "pro" feature that they feel they can upcharge for? (e.g. paying to flip a bit to unlock more battery life in an EV)

The lossy compression schemes used to be pretty simple, so they're a fast and easy way to reduce file size quickly, as older low-end cameras didn't have a ton of memory (costs money, y'know, and a modern camera has a few GB of RAM nowadays) or sometimes didn't support the newest/fastest card standards. In terms of IQ there is rarely a difference.

Most cameras offer lossless compressed raw these days, some (e.g. the low-end Nikon Zs, and also the flagship Z9) don't even have uncompressed raw anymore, only lossless compressed or a choice of lossy options. Much to the chagrin of some people, a particular Youtuber especially, who make a huge deal out of using uncompressed raw. The person in question doesn't understand what the word "lossless" means and claims there's a difference between losslessy compressed raws and "true uncompressed" raws.

I think compression is done by default because it speeds up picture taking immensely. My understanding is that there's a buffer that holds recently shot pics while they're being written to the SD card. Clearly, if you use compression, you can fit more pics in the buffer, allowing more consecutive snaps before the camera locks up for a bit.

Why it's lossy instead of lossless, I do not know. My guess is that lossy compression allows them to get more compression, and hence improve their effective buffer size for advertising purposes. I think 90% of the time this is a good trade-off. You can view some example artifacts here: https://stephenbayphotography.com/blog/sony-raw-compression-....

[Note that the author mentions being able to access uncompressed raw on his Sony after 2015, but it's a pro-level model. For the amateur models I believe there's no such option.]

Obviously, if you're trying to make them happen, you can do it, but for pics of your kids/pets/plants/etc. in normal daylight situations it shouldn't be a problem.

Still, as a technically minded person, it's infuriating to me that I can't access the original data.

I used to work for Blackmagic Design in the BRAW team (yes, technically not RAW, Red somehow got a bullshit patent on the compression of RAW data that they defend aggressively).

There was definitely an R&D cost associated with developing the libraries to read/write that format, and additional QA steps required when implementing them, but no additional hardware was needed (it actually required less on-hardware processing to write to RAW).

If a company has RAW support on one camera but not another - especially for still photos, it is 100% a market segmentation strategy.

It's more a product segmentation decision.

Casual photographers are fine with just using OOC JPEGs and apps like Apple or Google Photos. They aren't paying for Lightroom or Camera One and worrying about the sensor's dynamic range or ISO performance.

Also using RAW especially on higher megapixel sensors requires your entire stack to be more expensive. Computer needs to be fast with lots of hard drive space. You need a UHS-2 card reader as well as 300Mbps cards etc.

It's been a long time since I've bought a new camera, but I'm amazed that this would not be the case. My 2008-vintage Pentax K200D has the option to save JPEG and associated RAW images with every shot, as well as (IIRC) a button that could be configured to just do it when you're planning on having the need. Pentax has some great features for the price, but this was far from a fancy DSLR at the time.

How did you determine that the RAW images are lossy-compressed?

Menu -> Format -> Lossless 2:1, Lossless 4:1 etc

It's not a hidden feature by any stretch. Different vendors allow for different types. Some only allow a smaller frame size while still RAW. Some allow a compression to be applied.

Shorter answer, read the specs or RTFM.

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