M Raw

I was wondering if anyone here is shooting in M Raw and what are the advantages or disadvantages? Thanks in advance.

I never have, I have an "older" 1DM3 that shoots a 4MP sRaw, not my cup of tea.

From what I've seen, the "binning down" technology only offers the advantage of a smaller file but no advantage in IQ. And, it can't be "undone" so that you can't get back the full size Raw file and you may at some point regret that if you are doing "serious" photography for some purpose.

But, for some types of shooting, hey, whatever works, according to your preference and needs.

M Raw is a just smaller RAW file which will allow more images on your CF. Trade off is when you print. The larger the RAW, the larger you can print without having to upscale. It's easy to make an image smaller, not true the other way. Shoot full RAW and don't look back.

Buy a bigger card instead.

I shoot almost exclusively RAW, with jpeg as the occasional choice for a specific need.

The advantage I see to M RAW and S RAW is space saving on both the memory card and the computer. If you were to do stop motion/time lapse photography and wanted to shoot in some form of RAW, perhaps M RAW or S RAW would be better choices than RAW. However, your best choice would probably be to shoot fine quality, medium or small jpegs, assuming you would assemble this as a video.

There is another advantage, based on what I just saw in my 60D instruction manual. (Your instruction manual, or one downloaded for a camera you're considering, is your friend.) If you're doing continuous shooting, your burst rate is higher with the medium or small RAW than full size RAW. Again though, if you're doing something where you need to worry about how many shots you can take continuously, you should probably be doing that in jpeg. That means really setting up for proper white balance, exposure control, autofocus, et al.

My 60D can do M and S RAW. I'll always keep that as an open option. That said, I cannot imagine a situation where I would use it.

Hope this helps!

Thanks to all the posted, I guess I will go with raw since there appears to be no great advantage to m or s raw.

stlouis_26 wrote in post #12240108
Thanks to all the posted, I guess I will go with raw since there appears to be no great advantage to m or s raw.

It's all up to you -- actually the post above that mentioned time-lapse photography was an excellent example of photos that are dedicated to a use that would benefit to say sRaw-only (or even jpeg shooting). And, of course, there are business purposes that flat-out would benefit nothing from full-size Raw but would gain in terms of efficiency from mRaw/sRaw. No contest there, or even for those who choose to shoot jpegs for quick delivery to say a client or an editor.

But for those who are after the creative side of photography and the ability to get the most out of their images, well, I always advocate Raw, and I don't see any reasong to not go for full size either!

I find it interesting that if you shoot mRAW (i have 60d), when you convert it into DNG by lightroom, the size of the file increase the same as you shoot regular raw. Since I always convert raw file into DNG (gives smaller file size than CR2), I will just shoot regular raw and ignore mRAW....

njekin wrote in post #12255461
I find it interesting that if you shoot mRAW (i have 60d), when you convert it into DNG by lightroom, the size of the file increase the same as you shoot regular raw.

Here's why:
https://photography-on-the.net …ghlight=mRaw#po​st11316384