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Confessions of a RAW shooter
Seven reasons why I came to live without JPG.
(1) JPG compression is lossy.
With JPG, you lose information and gain artifacts every time you press save. This is because the JPG or JPEG algorithm is “lossy.” Otherwise, it would not be as fast. Other compressions, such as LZW or ZIP for TIFF, are not lossy, and neither is compressed DNG. I save my manipulated images as compressed TIFF. This is a slow process, but when uncompressed at the other end, the client sees one hundred percent the same image as I produced (assuming their monitor or printer is calibrated correctly).
Once you compress using the JPG algorithm, some information is irretrievably lost forever. Camera manufacturers know that and offer differing degrees of jpg compression. On modern cameras, you can choose between low, high, and raw resolution.
There is a place for JPG because saving smaller JPG files is faster than saving larger raw files. Sports photography, action sequences, and photographing animals in motion greatly benefit from JPG compression. One difference between professional and consumer cameras is the internal buffer size. It defines how many pictures a camera can hold before writing them onto the memory card. Expect to pay $500 extra for buffer size and speed, or shoot in .jpg!
