A question was raised about the effectiveness of the P7100’s internal RAW conversion process or JPEG engine. Since I normally shoot RAW plus JPG Basic, I thought I would see the effect of the internal raw conversion vs. Nikon Capture NX and Lightroom 3. I used a center crop of a picture I had taken of a couple of Mottled Ducks the other day. So, here they are.  Click on any of the images to see a larger size.  These shouldn’t be regarded as absolute comparisons because all have been resized for the blog.

The top left picture here was straight from the camera basic jpeg cropped and resized using Faststone.  I used faststone to crop and resize all the images.

The picture at the top right was the P7100 NRW file opened with Capture NX and saved immediately as a jpeg.  No processing was performed on the image.

At bottom left was the same NRW file converted to jpeg using lightroom 3.  Again, no processing.

The bottom right picture was slightly processed with Capture NX.  A small increase in saturation and unsharp mask was all that was added.