Help understanding RAW files & megabite

[Cayce Lee]

Can someone please help me understand why only some of my pictures that I take in RAW-fine/large format differentiate in size? Some are less than 1 MB and some are 4 MB but my camera capabiliy (Nikon D60) has a 10.1 MB max...sorry it may seem like a stupid question but rather an important one for me to understand. Thanks!

[Chip]

The D60 has 10.1 or so megapixels, which are the number of light collecting receptors on the camera's sensor.

Megabytes (MB) tell how much memory space on a card is used to store a photo. Generally, I understand that a photo with mainly uniform colors (such as a plain blue sky) will take up much less memory than will a photo with many different colors/shapes/subjects.

Hope this helps.

[CapnJack]

In addition to what Chip said, RAW images may be stored with non-lossy compression, such as run-length encoding. My understanding is that Canon raw images are a modified TIFF format. JPEG images, in comparison, use a compression technique that causes the loss of some information. Most of the time, we can live with the loss of data and we often don't notice it.

[Cayce Lee]

That helps alot of understanding megabites and RAW format...One more question though...how certain can I be that a picture that is taken in large, RAW format can be enlarged to it's capacity if what the picture information is telling me is the megabite size? sorry I feel like it's a stupid question...but then again there are no stupid questions right?

[Jim Poor]

First, there is no "Large" Raw format. Raw is raw and JPG has settings of Fine, Large, etc.

Second, file size is not a reliable indicator of maximum print size. For that, you need to focus on pixel dimensions and image quality.