Hi Loial
I'm probably going to end up dumping the 12-bit packed raw binary data most of the time - I'm using the camera in a research environment.
However, the next best thing would be 16-bit TIFF, which has the advantage of being readable by most scientific software packages right out of the box. I'm using a monochrome camera though, I appreciate that writing 16-bit RGB TIFF data from the color model will not be so efficient!
I've tried both multipage TIFF (all frames in one big file) and sequences of TIFF images on high-end high speed scientific cameras. I've run into major problems with multipage TIFF, and strongly recommend saving a directory of numbered TIFF files instead, being aware of the file management inconvenience that can cause. In my experience, there seems to be an effective 4GB file size limit in the TIFF standard, which will cause trouble for anyone who wants to dump more than 3 GB of the RAM at once (allowing for the zero padding). Most scientific software will stop reading a multipage TIFF at 4 gb even if the file is bigger! So yeah, multiple files is the way to go if you're going to pick which to implement first.
ps. Any chance the 12 bit packed RAW mode could be modified to write a few bytes of header data to make writing decoders for it easier? (i.e. pixels width and height and bits per pixel)?
