Mastering the Nikon D300

1.15. 12-Bit or 14-Bit Color Depth

Up to now, our Nikon DSLRs have used a 12-bit color depth to contain the red, green, and blue colors of the subject (RGB). Twelve bits allows us to have 4096 levels of color for each of the three color channels in our image. That means that there can be 4096 levels of red, 4096 levels of green, and 4096 levels of blue.

Once you switch the camera to 14-bit mode in NEF (RAW) recording on the Shooting Menu, your D300 will now record four times more data in each color channel, or 16384 levels for each of the Red, Green, and Blue channels. That will necessarily do two things:

1. Slow the frame rate of the camera significantly, since it is processing 64 times more data.

2. Make the image's file size increase, since each ...