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Nikon camera settings - Raw compression

Nikon offers a form of “visually loss less” compression in its NEF file format. Compressed NEFs take up about half the disk space as uncompressed NEFs. If you shoot a D50, D70, D70s, D80, uncompressed NEF is not available; all the NEFs will be compressed. On the higher-end Nikon DSLRs, you can choose between compressed and uncompressed NEF. If you have the room on your memory cards, uncompressed NEF guarantees the absolute best image quality.

However it has been widely reported that In real-world tests, however, it is nearly impossible to see differences between compressed and uncompressed NEFs, so don’t be afraid to use NEF compression. You may be interested to know that Nikon’s compression scheme primarily affects tonal differences in the highlight regions of the image, and that these tonal differences are so hard to distinguish that in most cases there is no loss of image quality.

Summary

Even if you have the option to have uncompressed NEF files, set it to compressed.