cRaw vs. Raw

[Adam2670]

So I've seen some debate on this as well, Sony claims the cRaw is lossless, I've seen posts around the net stating that is not so, they save it as an 8bit image which I guess is then upscaled to 12 or something like that.

I seldom work with raw images but will be getting married in Hawaii in a few weeks, I plan on using mostly .jpgs initially for printing and minor spot detailing and was going to use the Raw/jpg capture mode for future use of the raw files being that will be imortant.

My 2 problems are, I noticed the raw/jpg mode's jpg files are not the xtrafine mode jpgs so this may hurt me in the short term using them for print and family type things so I'm not certain that mode is right for me. Second issue is do I use the cRaw mode, if it's truly no different than raw, why bother, I mean I always assume things like bigger is better, so is this not the case? and if I is, how much worse is it?

thanks for reading =)
-Adam

[fjbyrne]

For something as important as a wedding I would definitely be shooting RAW (or RAW+JPG). I've used both RAW and cRAW and haven't seen a big difference. But since the release of version 4 of the firmware for the A700 I understand you can see the difference at the higher ISOs.

I would buy some extra CF cards and shoot RAW+JPG. RAW affords you much more flexibility than JPG. Again IMO if it's important - shoot RAW.