Hard drive space is cheap... sRAW is too small to really be of any use. What's the point in being able to recover highlights on an image that only is 1500px wide? Skip it and shoot regular raw.
I can see it on the 1dsIII just because the buffer will empty faster and res is still high enough for fast action sports. Otherwise if your going to pay big bucks for the res why waste it?
I heard (keyword heard, don't know if it's true but makes some sense) that sRAW gets rid of a lot of noise when shooting at high ISOs, in effect making the pixel density bigger by decreasing the resolution. Sort of how FFs have less noise than crop sensors. Any truth to this?
sraw gives you all the pros (and cons) of raw mode even for images that you know do not need to be full resolution. It costs you nothing to have it and so there is nothing to complain about. Shooting raw is fine and that's what I do but I don't always want 12-24MB raw files from my 1Ds2 for shots that will only ever be viewed on-screen and need not be 16.7 Mpx. sraw is easier than using another camera as well as my 1Ds2, and besides it's increasingly difficult to come across a new low-res P&S camera let alone a DSLR.
I agree that hard drives are cheap. Even if CF are cheaper than they were, they still represent a non negligible cost, with all these 12 or 15 MP sensors.
When travelling far from computers for days or weeks, I often get close to filling completely the storage I have available. Earlier this month, I even had to shoot some pictures in Jpg mode, just because I was running out of CF much faster than expected, and because I could not even turn my hyperdrive on for a backup due to high altitude. Rather than that, I would prefer to keep everything in Raw format, since Raw is the workflow I am used to, and switching to sRaw for the pictures that I know I will not print big.
So, among all the features camera makers seem to include in their new models, I think sRaw is one I would use occasionally (for one feature like that there is easily 10 I would never use, so why not ? ).
On the 1D3 I found sRAW too small to be useful, but the various different sized sRAW of the 50D, and I would guess future bodies, does look very interesting. Without trying it, it is difficult to know for sure though.
I think you'll need to get the minutes to the Canon focus group and marketing meetings in order to solve this mystery. One supposed practical reason is to transfer the smaller RAW image more quickly to the final destination.
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