Sony A7R IV 'Cooks' Its RAW Files, Just Like Its Predecessors
Previous Sony cameras all 'cooked' their raw files, even with uncompressed raw. In my experience, this shows up as 'brittle' files that 'break' when pushed beyond a certain—post processing is impaired whereas raw files from cameras like the Nikon D850 and Nikon Z7 have resilience to them.
Alex Tutubalin of RawDigger comments:
Sony A7R III has very same gaps, one level missing out of 16 signs of 'cooked file' (noise reduction, star eater, etc, etc)
Gapping a levels means potential posterization in dark tones; the eye picks up abrupt transitions.
When will we get a fully serious camera from Sony? With lossless compressed uncooked raw? Is it going to take 5 generations? What about focus stepping support for focus stacking, and multiple-exposure capability and more? Sony is intent on some areas (autofocus) but drops the ball in all sorts of areas that are useful to me.
OTOH, this behavior below may actually be among the best—see the Nikon D850 histogram below it.
Sony claims 15-bit dynamic range, which is a total joke when there are two pixel gaps in dark tones, and rampant hot pixels in dark areas in daylight exposures (which I will be showing). Image quality is not proven by ordinary images in ordinary lighting, but by how a camera performs in difficult circumstances.
However, to be fair to Sony, take a look at the Nikon D850 further below.
The Nikon D850 gaps its raw 14-bit lossless compressed raw files every 7 pixels in the red channel, every 8 pixels in the blue channel, and every 59 pixels in the green channel. So the Sony raw file looks to be far higher quality.