Is It Raw Or JPEG?

By John S. Krill NOCCC #3160

I’m a photographer. I worry about the content of a photograph and give little attention to all the technical mumbo/jumbo you see on the WEB. To this end I get really tired of all the EXPERTS telling us unenlightened what we really need to use in order to get that perfect photograph.

Well most of what they tell us is just bunk anyway.

To test my ‘Theory of Bunk’ I brought two 13X19 inch prints to the NOCCC monthly meeting and asked the membership to try and determine which print was from a 10MP sensor or a 16MP sensor. Which one was recorded in the camera as a JPEG image and which imaged was recorded as a RAW image. And finally I asked the group if they could tell which print was cropped.

I also gave the members a third option and that was ‘Undecided.’ I didn’t want any guessing.

I actually thought the cropped decision would be simple in that you really couldn’t crop a JPEG image and still have a good print. Right? Especially since the print was 13”X19”. But wait the results were really interesting.

So what happened? Here is the raw (Pun Intended.) data. For me it looks like a draw and considering how many voted ‘Undecided’ I would come to the conclusion that you CAN’T tell the difference between the two prints. Or it could be that the two cameras weren’t that far apart in the quality of the images they produced. The cameras were a Nikon D40X with a 10MP sensor (Picture 2) and a Nikon D5100 with a 16MP sensor (Picture 1.)

	Picture 1	Picture 2
Sensor Size	16MP	10MP
10 MP	3	5
16 MP	4	1
Undecided	3	3
File Type	RAW	JPEG
JPEG		4
RAW	4
Undecided	6	6
Cropped	No	Yes
Yes	3	1
No		2
Undecided	7	7

The Pictures? No I’m not going to show them because a JEPG version for the Web or for the Orange Bytes would result in photos that no one would be able to see any difference in quality. Photos on the Web will look great even using a smartphone. This is one time you just had to be there.