[thomassannes]

Thats why i LOVE the RAW button... if i take a picture i really love i just save the jpg as a RAW.
i take around 20-40.000 pictures every year! with my nikon D300 i tok 145.000 pictures... i have gigabytes of gigabytes of raw files :P
So my new strategy is to keep the daily pictures small.

Edit: obviously the camera just saves the RAW data in memory until next picture is taken... its not possible to convert jpg to RAW

[alohadave]

Hi All! I suspect I know how the answers will run here, but curious for opinions. I used to shoot RAW with my K100d, but on moving up to the K20d my computer just couldn't handle the files, plus I was running out of hard drive space. So I started shooting JPEGs, and as I had never needed a larger print from the K100d, I set the K20d to 6MP. I would try to remember to use the RAW button when I saw something really good, and would switch to RAW for special projects; but honestly as the noise seemed so much more pronounced I always went back. I really like not having to process every shot, and feel I can do a fair bit of work on JPEGs with FastStone, GIMP, etc. if I have to.

Still, now I have upgraded both my PC and my camera again, this time to a K5. As I went through and adjusted my settings, I again went to 6MP JPEGs. But I have been thinking perhaps I am giving up some of the good for which I bought the K5 in the first place. Any body-specific thoughts on the trade-offs involved?

Thanks, Nick

I normally shoot RAW with my K-5, but when I shoot JPEG, I have it set to 6MP. I don't do a lot of heavy cropping, and the JPEGs are either for party shots or casual stuff, or for panoramas.

One thing you might want to do is when you think you've take a really good shot, or a shot that you want to play with later, you can save the last picture taken as a RAW.

[Colbyt]

Shoot me now i have a K-5 and i actually set it to 2mpix and one star for regular family photos.
the quality is very good for web usage and home use.

However when I'm out and taking pictures of "stuff" i always shoot RAW.

No need to shoot you. I always shoot the highest quality jpg so that I can edit crop or compress as I see fit. I find it far easier to compress than it is to expand.

Someday I may be into doing it raw but right now the camera does a better job than I would.

[Verglace]

I sometimes use my netbook which is a single core atom cpu with 2gb of ram to process my k-5 photos while I'm on a trip and it can handle it fine. I think your computer may just have too many background programs running that slowed it down. I've seen this happen with someones laptop, he had 2 anti viruses running and it was slowing the computer down to a crawl, I uninstalled one and it ran perfectly. I'm not saying thats the case with you but it definately sounds like there are other programs using up your resources since a dual core CPU from 2009 should be able to run it fine. I would suggest perhaps going through task manager and switching of programs that are running but you don't use.... or even back up your data and reformat your computer. You will find that after a reformat things will be much faster. Get those 1 tb external hard drives for the back up and for future storage, they are amazingly cheap and very useful.