Question 8

Choosing raw does not affect your camera’s continuous shooting performance

ANSWER (C) Score 1 Your camera’s continuous shooting speed, in frames per second, is governed by the mechanical construction of its shutter mechanism, its mirror mechanism (if it’s a DSLR), and the ability of its internal processor to keep up with the volume of data. However, it’s not possible for the camera to write this data to the memory card as quickly as it captures it, so it has to store it in the camera’s short-term memory ‘buffer’. When you shoot JPEGs, this fills up more slowly because the files are smaller, and this means the camera can keep shooting for longer. When you shoot raw files, the buffer fills up more quickly, and the camera will slow down or stop shooting much sooner.

For example, the Nikon D7200 can shoot at six frames per second – but while it can capture 100 Fine JPEGs in a burst, it can only capture 18 raw files before the buffer is full. Cameras that have a big raw buffer capacity are expensive.