RAW vs. JPEG and Lightroom

[dukane]

I ordered a NEX5N last weekend and am patiently (okay, maybe not so patiently) awaiting its arrival in the mail.

I also recently purchased a copy of Adobe Lightroom to play around with my photos, (which is one of the main reasons I decided to purchase a better camera).

I have heard that the NEX5N raw files are not yet supported by Adobe, and I have a couple questions about that.

Generally, how long after a camera is released before Adobe's software is updated?

and

Is it still worth it to take photos in raw format and use some other software to convert and input them for now, or is the quality of the JPEG output good enough for a master copy? I'm not taking any professional or commercial photos, I just want to be able to archive images of the best quality.

I will be traveling in Europe this winter, and want to take some awesome photos... hopefully I will be able to learn the NEX5N and take advantage of all it has to offer!

-Matt

 

[olli]

A few weeks sometimes - it can depend on how many cameras there are to support. Adobe announced support for the C3 and A35 on 23 August (a release candidate - not quite the final product but close enough).

It's not worth converting simply because by the time anyone updates RAW to DNG conversion software Adobe will probably have released their LR update (and their DNG converter update).

Only you can decide if the JPEG quality is good enough for you, but if you're not using RAW then you're only using a small part of the potential of LR. I always shoot in RAW and highest quality JPEG on any camera I own. That way if the JPEG is good enough I can file the RAW away and forget about it. If it's not, then I have the RAW to work on.

 

[pictor]

One can shoot JPEGs and raw until Lightroom supports the camera. It is good to know the JPEG engine of ones camera anyway and one can do the final development later, if one can wait for some weeks.

 

[dukane]

Thanks for the insight! I really appreciate it.

-Matt