Writing Time

So, if you're out shooting with an original EOS Digital Rebel, a creaky silver plastic 300D, and it has only, like one bar of battery left so you're turning it off after each shot to conserve juice...you should probably remember to wait for a solid five- or six-Mississippi to flick the switch to "OFF" because it takes that thing FOREVER to write a RAW file and if you turn it off in the middle of the save process it just corrupts the data.

Just throwing that out there. No particular reason.

Have a colorful photo shot in RAW...after I noticed that glitch.

That was shot in RAW and processed in Adobe Photoshop Bridge, just hitting "Adobe Vivid" and the "Auto" correction button.

For contrast, I switched the camera over to the Large Fine JPEG setting and shot the same scene...

It only takes about two seconds to record the highest quality JPEG, since it only takes up a little over 2MB on the card rather than the 6.6MB of a RAW file.

These days it's easy to forget that in the early days of higher-resolution digital photography, recording speed was a limiting factor; so much of one that Digital Photography Review measured how long it took to write files to the card.

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