Nikon Is Doing Away With RAW in DSLR's

*****UPDATE****** If anyone couldn’t tell this was and April Fools joke that I came up with months ago and filmed in early March. ******UPDATE*****

The other day I received an interesting press release from Nikon. Normally when I get press release or notifications of new products they are accompanied by NDA Agreements. What that means is in order for them to give me information I have to sign a form saying I wont divulge the information before its embargo date.

Well this release was different and I think it came to me by accident. I reached out to Nikon for more information and they did not return my call. So at this point I decided to share this information with you.

Nikon is doing away with RAW in all consumer end DSLR’s in the future. So based on the current lineup the D610 and below would have no option to shoot RAW what so ever. The Nikon D800 and D4s which are the top of the line models would continue to have RAW as an option.

My worry is that in the future Nikon will ship all cameras with the ability to shoot RAW but you will have to pay to unlock it to use it in your cameras. If that day ever comes I am completely done with Nikon.

The quote in the press release coming from Japan “Here at Nikon we feel that the RAW Format is no longer needed. The cameras we are building are so advanced and sophisticated at processing that the resulting jpegs are close to perfect.”

Of course the first thing that comes to mind is that they might as well call this the Ken Rockwell edition camera.

I understand what they are doing, they are trying to take as much control away from amateurs as possible thinking they never will want to shoot RAW.

Well of course I think that is a load of crap and if this release is real and this is something NIKON is thinking of doing I will be the first to trade in all my Nikon gear and go Canon.