14bit or 12bit

[Jaded]

I now have a body that can give me two extra bites. 

What does the panel think - of use only in extreme circumstances, or capture everything you can, whenever you can (to hell with the extra processing time and disk space)

[Charlotte]

My cameras are always set to 14 bit RAW, FINE mode.  Storage is cheap - unless you're shooting thousands of images a day, why would you not do this?

[Jaded]

I think I probably knew the answer to this - which is that it depends on what you are shooting. Yesterday it was football, which is fast-paced and takes no prisoners. The opportunity for prediction is low and so the shot count is high. I'd read that the 12bit RAW is circa 14.9MB and 14bit c 18.8MB, so storage could have been a problem, as was write speed too.

Some low light stuff the day before was probably crying out for the extra 2 bits.

[Charlotte]

Fair point, I don't do sports. 

[ed_o_brain]

When I shoot sports, it's usually because I'm getting paid to do so. And the people paying me usually want a good clean shot of every player in action. So I shoot JPEG.

If I was shooting to get the best possible shots of a particular player/team I'd probably shoot RAW/14 bit. If I was shooting with a view to getting a picture in a newspaper I'd probably shoot JPEG - knowing full well the time it hit's the sport's editors desk is more crucial than the quality of the photograph.

It's a question of convenience versus quality.

It's also a question of confidence (and the image recipients workflow). I'm a reasonably good sports shooter - when I've had sufficient practice - it's a skill that needs regular honing up. I never shoot in burst mode*, always single shot. The skill is in anticipating what happens next and I get a good hit rate, so quite happy to shoot RAW when shooting for myself.

*Only exception to this is Golf...

[David Martin]

RAW is too slow for my venerable D80. In fact JPEG is pushing it as the buffer only holds about 5 JPEG at peak, and write speed is slowish.
Most of the time JPEG is close enough that I don't need to use RAW (and go through the processing joy)

[Pedal Castro]

Shoot the same scene in 12bit and 14bit and then pixel peep, can you tell the difference? If you can, then decide if the difference is worth the extra file size and write speed.

For sports, I shoot jpeg only, everything else is raw, for reasons given above.