It all depends - on many factors.
I guess when you want a car for your granny so she can get some groceries, you would not buy her a ferrari.
Or when you want to plough a field, you might want something bigger than a smart car.
This thread opened my eyes a bit (mostly in astonishement): http://forums.culturalheritageimaging.o … he-cooked/
Also, here we discussed the use of jpegs: Accuracy and speed. I’m impressed. Might also be interesting because it starts with an awesome model made with images from a P4P.
I personally think that for most purposes, jpegs are sufficient. If you shot raws, you can also develop them into jpegs (at 90% quality or higher of course). The difference to Tiff is small, especially since RC does not support 16bit - although I’m not 100% positive if that is only for export or also for import. So using raws directly might make sence when you have a very high dynamic range, meaning bright sky as well as deep shadows (e.g. shooting inside a cave towards its opening or vice versa). If you have a well lit object (like your example), the dynamic range is not too great. Just look at the histogram of the raw - if the whole width is covered by the curve, you will lose information transforming it into 8 bit, if it is only about half, then not. At least that is how I understand it…