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The Leica Q2

SrMphoto

Well-known member
Does the Leica Q2 have the same sensor as the new Lumix S1r?
RawDigger shows that Q2 and S1r sensors have a different number of native pixels. LR applies in both cases the built-in profile and reduces them slightly to the same size.
I suspect that they have different sensors.
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
I compress nothing. Heck Toshiba 14TB HDD cost but $480 now.
Just because you can buy a lot of space doesn't mean you should waste it.

Losslessly compressed DNG changes nothing other than reducing the amount of storage you are consuming. It's a sensible thing to do. The DNG standard lossless compression is very tight, but it's generally not implemented in camera because the compression algorithm requires more computing power than in camera processors have to spare, on average. Any desktop or tablet computer... it's a piece of cake these days.

I use it with all my out of camera uncompressed DNG files. Never a single problem.

G
 

drunkenspyder

Well-known member
And what is anybody going to do with 14TB of images. They can't all be keepers. After 45 years I can put my keepers, meaning photos that I have printed, on an SD card.
I could also probably put all my keepers on a card, or at least a jump drive. In fact, I know I could, because I don't have that many! But I don't throw everything else away. Funny, because just this morning I was explaining to my partner why I don't throw any image away, including black frames, white frames, and LCCs. I keep it all, because storage is cheap, which I believe was part of Al's point, and to which I would add: images are not.

I expend great effort to go and get my images. I've had the experience in the field of trying to swap backups between an underspec'ed laptop and external cards & drives which led me to mistakenly delete images for which I had no backup, in order to make room on a drive. So, I will never ever again in my life lack for storage space. Once bitten, ten times shy.

I have two Areca RAID arrays attached to my primary workstation at home. Each is outfitted with eight 10tb drives, formatted RAID-10, each with a hot spare. I have two Synology NAS rack units, one with 16 bays, and one with 8. I also back up to two separate off-site backup services. I don't do all this only for photos. I have a family that depends on reliable storage and backup, music and video service distribution throughout the house, etc. My DSD audio files are typically bigger than 2gb, my 4k video ones are often larger than 80gb. Gotta put them somewhere. To my family, their backed up photos are just as precious as my "keepers." And some of my all-time favorites are little snapshots from early digicams, scans of old photos, etc., none of which are print candidates, but are beyond priceless to me. So, I buy the most storage I can reasonably afford, deploy it in the most stable and highest speed way I know how. And I rest easy at night. If my house burns down, I still have it all. if my laptop is stolen, or gets destroyed traveling, I still have it all. When on the road, I can reach my network and access any image I want to work on.

If I only need to show or ship or travel with some print-worthy images somewhere, a jump drive or card is perfect. But that is the smallest piece of why data storage matters to me.
 

drunkenspyder

Well-known member
Just because you can buy a lot of space doesn't mean you should waste it.

Losslessly compressed DNG changes nothing other than reducing the amount of storage you are consuming. It's a sensible thing to do. The DNG standard lossless compression is very tight, but it's generally not implemented in camera because the compression algorithm requires more computing power than in camera processors have to spare, on average. Any desktop or tablet computer... it's a piece of cake these days.

I use it with all my out of camera uncompressed DNG files. Never a single problem.

G
To each their own. I am not advocating "wasting space." And while I can't speak for Al, as a C1 user, I have zero reason to add a DNG conversion step into my workflow, because I am lazy at heart. And space is cheap. I am not even sure what it means to describe it as "wasted." If one has a 4tb HD, and one uses 2tb of it, how is it a "waste" to not compress files? if one has a 2tb drive, and is constantly deleting files in order to upgrade the OS, or archiving files to make room for others, one really needs a larger drive or a different storage architecture, though DNG might help delay the inevitable. I can understand the view that a large HD also might permit one to adopt sloppy preservation habits, but that's a different risk. So, I guess I don't see the "wasted space" point of view. But as I said, to each their own. I do understand the DNG-as-archival-standard point off view. That one makes plenty of sense, and I could also see the DNG-as-common-format point of view for people who use multiple platforms.
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
Wasting space is not not compressing your files, it is keeping all your rejects.
I delete the rejects too.

But there are many photos that are not 'rejects' but that I haven't chosen to render just yet. Out of a given session and say 50 good exposures, I usually choose to render about 8 or 10 of them and save the rest for another time. Sometimes just one gets rendered for many months or many years afterwards.

What I consider a reject may be different from what you consider a reject, of course. But I run the DNG compression to save on storage space regardless of what I choose to save. That seems sensible to me.

G
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
To each their own. I am not advocating "wasting space." And while I can't speak for Al, as a C1 user, I have zero reason to add a DNG conversion step into my workflow, because I am lazy at heart. And space is cheap. I am not even sure what it means to describe it as "wasted." If one has a 4tb HD, and one uses 2tb of it, how is it a "waste" to not compress files? if one has a 2tb drive, and is constantly deleting files in order to upgrade the OS, or archiving files to make room for others, one really needs a larger drive or a different storage architecture, though DNG might help delay the inevitable. I can understand the view that a large HD also might permit one to adopt sloppy preservation habits, but that's a different risk. So, I guess I don't see the "wasted space" point of view. But as I said, to each their own. I do understand the DNG-as-archival-standard point off view. That one makes plenty of sense, and I could also see the DNG-as-common-format point of view for people who use multiple platforms.
Presuming that C1 supports DNG files, it takes very little effort to use DNG Converter and batch convert all the uncompressed DNGs to compressed DNGs before adding them into C1. If the file size drops by half, it means that you have that much longer to go before you need to clear space on your working or archive storage drives, that's all, and that backups go faster as well.

Wasting space in the context of saying "I don't compress the files because I can easily afford a bigger storage drive and don't want to take the time" is the same kind of waste as saying "I'll drive a big gas guzzling car because gasoline is cheap enough that I don't care." I find that is unacceptable from a philosophical standpoint and strive not to participate in waste of that sort, that's all.

G
 

SrMphoto

Well-known member
Presuming that C1 supports DNG files, it takes very little effort to use DNG Converter and batch convert all the uncompressed DNGs to compressed DNGs before adding them into C1. If the file size drops by half, it means that you have that much longer to go before you need to clear space on your working or archive storage drives, that's all, and that backups go faster as well.

Wasting space in the context of saying "I don't compress the files because I can easily afford a bigger storage drive and don't want to take the time" is the same kind of waste as saying "I'll drive a big gas guzzling car because gasoline is cheap enough that I don't care." I find that is unacceptable from a philosophical standpoint and strive not to participate in waste of that sort, that's all.

G
With LR you can also compress DNG files in place, after import.
The only issue could be that some competitions require unaltered raw files.
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
With LR you can also compress DNG files in place, after import.
The only issue could be that some competitions require unaltered raw files.
Sure, but he was saying he was a c1 user.

I would never submit to a competition that required my raw files. What would be the point of that? I don't submit work to forensic or documentarian/journalistic competitions. I submit work to fine arts photography exhibition and competition occasionally... what negative I start with is of no importance; it's the final image that matters—nothing else.

G
 

ptomsu

Workshop Member
Sure, but he was saying he was a c1 user.

I would never submit to a competition that required my raw files. What would be the point of that? I don't submit work to forensic or documentarian/journalistic competitions. I submit work to fine arts photography exhibition and competition occasionally... what negative I start with is of no importance; it's the final image that matters—nothing else.

G
Could not have said it better :thumbs:

Peter
 

drunkenspyder

Well-known member
With LR you can also compress DNG files in place, after import.
The only issue could be that some competitions require unaltered raw files.
As another wrote, I cannot imagine giving over my RAW files to anyone else. But that’s my choice, and in any event, since I am not a LR user, its in-flow ability to convert to DNG—which could be quite an advantage to anyone who wants to do this—does me no good. While some might see the conversion process as minimal effort, it’s more than zero, and as I said, I am lazy, and even more than that, simply don’t need to add another step. Since I archive every image anyway, and have the space, the DNG conversion process affords me no real advantage other than the “best bet as an archive format” argument I mentioned earlier. I might still go that way at some point in the future. But for now, it would afford me no workflow advantage.
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
As another wrote, I cannot imagine giving over my RAW files to anyone else. But that’s my choice, and in any event, since I am not a LR user, its in-flow ability to convert to DNG—which could be quite an advantage to anyone who wants to do this—does me no good. While some might see the conversion process as minimal effort, it’s more than zero, and as I said, I am lazy, and even more than that, simply don’t need to add another step. Since I archive every image anyway, and have the space, the DNG conversion process affords me no real advantage other than the “best bet as an archive format” argument I mentioned earlier. I might still go that way at some point in the future. But for now, it would afford me no workflow advantage.
For those using Lightroom, at least, the compressed DNG files load faster. Particularly on relatively limited resource systems, like laptops.

G
 

SrMphoto

Well-known member
Sure, but he was saying he was a c1 user.

I would never submit to a competition that required my raw files. What would be the point of that? I don't submit work to forensic or documentarian/journalistic competitions. I submit work to fine arts photography exhibition and competition occasionally... what negative I start with is of no importance; it's the final image that matters—nothing else.

G
Sure, my comment does not apply to you.
There may be other forum readers who want to submit their images to top competitions like World Press Photo or Wildlife Photographer of the Year. For those, they must keep the originals in the unlikely case that their images get selected. I think a Leica Q2 is well suited for as a tool for the mentioned competitions.

Many photographers do not like competitions at all or want to do whatever they think is right for their image. Nothing wrong with that either, I am not advocating for competitions.
 

drunkenspyder

Well-known member
Presuming that C1 supports DNG files, it takes very little effort to use DNG Converter and batch convert all the uncompressed DNGs to compressed DNGs before adding them into C1. If the file size drops by half, it means that you have that much longer to go before you need to clear space on your working or archive storage drives, that's all, and that backups go faster as well.

Wasting space in the context of saying "I don't compress the files because I can easily afford a bigger storage drive and don't want to take the time" is the same kind of waste as saying "I'll drive a big gas guzzling car because gasoline is cheap enough that I don't care." I find that is unacceptable from a philosophical standpoint and strive not to participate in waste of that sort, that's all.

G
Godfrey:

I am sorry you find that offensive, but you really took a leap there and made it a bit personal. While I would prefer to presume good intent here, you make it difficult with your holier-than-thou implicit accusation. You only know a little about me, so instead you choose to presume much to mount your soapbox.Your analogy is actually very weak; a larger, more electrically efficient hard drive array is hardly the same thing as driving a gas guzzling car to do the same thing that one could do with a more efficient vehicle assuming roughly equivalent payloads; if anything, it’s more likely the inverse, and as a software/hardware person, you may already know that.

Further, your assumption about my wasteful attitude couldn’t be more incorrect; for one thing, while I realize fossil fuels here in the States are cheap in the abstract, especially for their energy capacity, I don’t find the cash it takes to buy them cheap at all and so I do not take gasoline profligacy lightly. Like you, I am retired, a legacy of the 50s, and like you (but maybe not) have finite resources I need to steward for the rest of my life. My entire home is run on solar (not net-metering). I pick appliances and computer/network components based on efficiency. I buy more storage space than I need at the primary stage so I can deploy it for backup purposes. I have had more than one CIO/CTO tell me that larger drives are more efficient, and to buy the largest I could afford. I realize one could make an argument that the larger hard drives themselves represent a manufacturing expenditure somewhere that marginally consumes more resources, but I doubt it can be parsed between smaller and larger drives in a home.

I do all these things because they actually save me TCO money; that they may be comparatively good things to do for the environment is a benefit, but not the first reason. I will actually get to a net gain on my solar investment in the next year or two, and since I live in the boonies, I am not contributing much to solar panel heating.

As for how I am willing to spend my time, thank goodness I still get to decide how to do that and am not subject to someone else’s morality standards. As do you!

If I have misread the pointedness of your philosophical comments, I hope you will forgive me. But your disdain was apparent and did not leave much doubt.

P.S. I decided to run a test on NEF and IIQ RAW files. I ran it on my iMac Pro; it’s an 18-core machine and I used its internal 4tb drive for the test. On average, without an embedded original RAW file, NEF files from the Z7 were reduced by 16%. Not trivial but hardly “by half.” IIQ files were reduced by about 8% without embedding, not trivial but not very significant. No surprise but IIQ files converted with embedding blossomed in size by over 100%. But if I choose to archive in DNG in the future, that is probably what I would do. It took my iMac just over 10 minutes with embedding, 9 minutes without, to convert a folder of 463 IIQ files ranging from about 100mb to 130mb each. Not a huge time investment, but also not zero. And again it’s my choice whether to use my time that way.

Greg
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
You're caught up in the analogy rather than the point, and the specifics of what you do are really not my business or concern. I'm speaking of my point of view, the analogy I drew is how I see it. Whether you hold the same point of view or not, well, that's up to you. I dislike wasteful practices, and to me the ability to buy massive storage inexpensively and then filling it up more than it ought to be is simply wasteful.

We're talking about Q2 DNG files here, not IIQ (whatever those are) or NEF files. The Q2 makes uncompressed DNG files that are approximately 88Mbytes in size. While I don't have a Q2 myself to test the compression with, I tested with M-D and CL files. The M-D produces lossless compressed DNG files, the CL produces uncompressed DNG files. Running 100 of each of them through the DNG Converter to apply DNG lossless compression, as expected the storage required for the M-D files was reduced by 200 Mbytes, likely not enough gain to warrant the time to convert, but the storage for the CL files was reduced by 2 Gbyte (7.2 g pre-compression, 5.2 g post-compression) ... That's certainly worth the effort.

In my opinion, of course. :D

I suspect the Q2 files would see a compression on the same order as the CL files in this example. You may count it as irrelevant to your needs, but that doesn't address the notion I'm espousing: that just because you have access to lots of cheap space doesn't justify treating it as an unlimited resource.

G

Godfrey:

I am sorry you find that offensive, but you really took a leap there and made it a bit personal. While I would prefer to presume good intent here, you make it difficult with your holier-than-thou implicit accusation. You only know a little about me, so instead you choose to presume much to mount your soapbox.Your analogy is actually very weak; a larger, more electrically efficient hard drive array is hardly the same thing as driving a gas guzzling car to do the same thing that one could do with a more efficient vehicle assuming roughly equivalent payloads; if anything, it’s more likely the inverse, and as a software/hardware person, you may already know that.

Further, your assumption about my wasteful attitude couldn’t be more incorrect; for one thing, while I realize fossil fuels here in the States are cheap in the abstract, especially for their energy capacity, I don’t find the cash it takes to buy them cheap at all and so I do not take gasoline profligacy lightly. Like you, I am retired, a legacy of the 50s, and like you (but maybe not) have finite resources I need to steward for the rest of my life. My entire home is run on solar (not net-metering). I pick appliances and computer/network components based on efficiency. I buy more storage space than I need at the primary stage so I can deploy it for backup purposes. I have had more than one CIO/CTO tell me that larger drives are more efficient, and to buy the largest I could afford. I realize one could make an argument that the larger hard drives themselves represent a manufacturing expenditure somewhere that marginally consumes more resources, but I doubt it can be parsed between smaller and larger drives in a home.

I do all these things because they actually save me TCO money; that they may be comparatively good things to do for the environment is a benefit, but not the first reason. I will actually get to a net gain on my solar investment in the next year or two, and since I live in the boonies, I am not contributing much to solar panel heating.

As for how I am willing to spend my time, thank goodness I still get to decide how to do that and am not subject to someone else’s morality standards. As do you!

If I have misread the pointedness of your philosophical comments, I hope you will forgive me. But your disdain was apparent and did not leave much doubt.

P.S. I decided to run a test on NEF and IIQ RAW files. I ran it on my iMac Pro; it’s an 18-core machine and I used its internal 4tb drive for the test. On average, without an embedded original RAW file, NEF files from the Z7 were reduced by 16%. Not trivial but hardly “by half.” IIQ files were reduced by about 8% without embedding, not trivial but not very significant. No surprise but IIQ files converted with embedding blossomed in size by over 100%. But if I choose to archive in DNG in the future, that is probably what I would do. It took my iMac just over 10 minutes with embedding, 9 minutes without, to convert a folder of 463 IIQ files ranging from about 100mb to 130mb each. Not a huge time investment, but also not zero. And again it’s my choice whether to use my time that way.

Greg
 
I have a 4TB hard drive with about 1.5TB currently filled. I suppose I could compress the files. The choice one way or another doesn't seem that much like a moral dilemma to me.
 

jdphoto

Well-known member
Godfrey:

I am sorry you find that offensive, but you really took a leap there and made it a bit personal. While I would prefer to presume good intent here, you make it difficult with your holier-than-thou implicit accusation. You only know a little about me, so instead you choose to presume much to mount your soapbox.Your analogy is actually very weak; a larger, more electrically efficient hard drive array is hardly the same thing as driving a gas guzzling car to do the same thing that one could do with a more efficient vehicle assuming roughly equivalent payloads; if anything, it’s more likely the inverse, and as a software/hardware person, you may already know that.

Further, your assumption about my wasteful attitude couldn’t be more incorrect; for one thing, while I realize fossil fuels here in the States are cheap in the abstract, especially for their energy capacity, I don’t find the cash it takes to buy them cheap at all and so I do not take gasoline profligacy lightly. Like you, I am retired, a legacy of the 50s, and like you (but maybe not) have finite resources I need to steward for the rest of my life. My entire home is run on solar (not net-metering). I pick appliances and computer/network components based on efficiency. I buy more storage space than I need at the primary stage so I can deploy it for backup purposes. I have had more than one CIO/CTO tell me that larger drives are more efficient, and to buy the largest I could afford. I realize one could make an argument that the larger hard drives themselves represent a manufacturing expenditure somewhere that marginally consumes more resources, but I doubt it can be parsed between smaller and larger drives in a home.

I do all these things because they actually save me TCO money; that they may be comparatively good things to do for the environment is a benefit, but not the first reason. I will actually get to a net gain on my solar investment in the next year or two, and since I live in the boonies, I am not contributing much to solar panel heating.

As for how I am willing to spend my time, thank goodness I still get to decide how to do that and am not subject to someone else’s morality standards. As do you!

If I have misread the pointedness of your philosophical comments, I hope you will forgive me. But your disdain was apparent and did not leave much doubt.

P.S. I decided to run a test on NEF and IIQ RAW files. I ran it on my iMac Pro; it’s an 18-core machine and I used its internal 4tb drive for the test. On average, without an embedded original RAW file, NEF files from the Z7 were reduced by 16%. Not trivial but hardly “by half.” IIQ files were reduced by about 8% without embedding, not trivial but not very significant. No surprise but IIQ files converted with embedding blossomed in size by over 100%. But if I choose to archive in DNG in the future, that is probably what I would do. It took my iMac just over 10 minutes with embedding, 9 minutes without, to convert a folder of 463 IIQ files ranging from about 100mb to 130mb each. Not a huge time investment, but also not zero. And again it’s my choice whether to use my time that way.

Greg
Just don't say film is harder than digital...
 
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