RAW or JPEG? JPEG or RAW? Too. Many. Decisions. Fortunately, a new Canon patent suggests technology that could make that choice for you.


Discovered by Egami, the patent explains a feature for DSLRs that could, if you wanted it to, automate the choice between JPEG and RAW file types. The idea is simple: when acquiring hundreds of images, it pays to save the best ones as RAW and the less good ones as JPEGs, but nobody has the time to do that by hand.

So, when shooting in burst mode or panning while tracking a subject, the technology would apparently rapidly check the images for quality—and then save the file accordingly. So, using information about framing, sharpness or something else, the images deemed of high quality by the camera would be saved as RAW, while the lesser ones would be saved as JPEG. Simple.


Obviously, this is only a patent, so it may never turn into a real thing. But it sure sounds like a nifty trick to save memory card capacity—and effort. [Egami via Canon Watch via Peta Pixel]