Nikon RAW shooters read this!

[RonFrank]

Here is a D200 TIP that I recently discovered. I'm not sure if this applies to other Nikon DSLR's.

If you use compressed RAW (Lossless), the shots remaining does NOT change vs. using RAW noncompressed! This is a bit messed up, but I think I understand why.

I just did a little test. With a 512K card formatted using RAW + Basic the shot counter said 27 shots. However when I shot until I filled the card I got 70 shots! Once the shot counter would hit zero, it would add shots back to the remaining counter as the buffer cleared, but never what exactly was remaining. Shoot again to zero, and it adds shots as it writes the buffer. This test was done shooting my floor, so I did a second test shooting outdoors with a more realistic subject (rocks, tree, sky).

With the second test I shot until the buffer was full (19 shots), and waited until the buffer cleared and the counter went to 15 (7 shots above the original 27 limit). I shot off the 15 shots and after the buffer cleared I had another 7 shots. I shot again, and this time the counter stopped at 3. I did it again and the counter stoped at 1. I shot until the counter would not increase beyond zero, and ended up with 46 shots total. That's 19 shots above the orginal 27 or roughly a 70% increase!

So if you shoot RAW compressed the shot counter is completely inaccurate. Nikon indicates this buried in the manual, but this is something I certainly missed, and I'm guessing I'm not the only one! In addition they don't really say anything other than the "camera setting do not change when shooting RAW compressed". Not very well defined, hence the test.

So with a 2 gig card rather then the 110 shots the counter tells you are available, the reality is that you should expect around 187 shooting compressed RAW.

Not very well implemented on Nikon's behalf!

It would be interesting if owners of other modes (D50/70/80/D2x) would try this out and see if the implementation is similar (my guess is yes).

 

[Jcsgt]

Wow, I don't shoot compressed, but good to know anyway. I'll have to try that with my D2H.

 

[Charlie99]

It's probably giving you a "worst case" shots left count --- assuming that at any given time that all future shots will require maximum card space.

So it always underestimates the number of shots left.

If your underwater shots have a lot of blue water, then your compression will be more like your shots of the floor than your outdoor shots.

 

[RonFrank]

It's probably giving you a "worst case" shots left count

If your underwater shots have a lot of blue water, then your compression will be more like your shots of the floor than your outdoor shots.

I was thinking along similar lines. Since RAW compressed is a lossless format the assumption is that EVERY adjacent pixel could be different, even if that is extremely unlikely.

Compression algorithms generally work something like this. Colors are represented by numeric values so pixels may be represented like:

250,251,252,252,252,252,252,252,253

In a lossless format the end result might look like:

250,251,#6#252,253

One can see this results in lossless compression that reduces the size by close to 50%.

I'm still not crazy about Nikons implementation of this. I would rather see an optimistic representation, that is altered as the data is written to the card. This of course could result in the photographer running out of shot near the end of the card more quickly, but the current implementation results in the shooter assuming they are almost out of shots, when in fact they have quit a bit left.

I'm going to pay more attention to this as I shoot, and see what happens with a larger card when I near the limit. With the 512K card I never saw more than a 7 shot increase on the counter.

Maybe I'm being to quick to judge this as I've never paid that much attention to how it behaves as the card fills.

 

[Chris Bangs]

Very interesting! In reality I honestly have not ever taken notice of how many images I actually shot on a full card.

 

[RonFrank]

Well, I jumped the gun a bit saying that the implementation was poor.

I took a 1G card, and ripped off 20 shots. But the counter (after the buffer right) only showed a decrease of 12 shots. So apparently as you shoot, the counter is adjusting based on worst case scenerio (20MB for RAW+JPB Basic (high)). But that is not so bad as the counter is adjusting as one shoots even if the initial shot counter is way off.

 

[AUTiger]

I tried a similar experiment with my D80, shooting at my carpeted floor. I shot Compressed Raw + large/fine jpeg. A freshly formated 2 gig card shows 109 shots. I was able to take 149 shots before filling the card. Incidentally, the freshly formated 2 gig card will hold 163 compressed raw (probably about 230 in reality).

I'm glad to hear this. It means a 4 gig card should allow me to easily do 2 dives (probably even 3 dives) without having to open my housing.

Now if I just had a housing.

David

 

[Mike Veitch]

oooooo D80... nice!

 

[dbh]

I don't have enough time to see how many shots my 8G holds....

The counter says 488 on RAW.

 

[pcarlson1911]

When I upgraded my d70 firmware, this was one of the fixes. I am surprised that this hasn't been addressed with new camera models!??