Compressed or not?

[soupdragon]

This topic may have already been done to death but....

Can anyone tell me if Canon's raw files (.crw) are compressed or not.
I say this as my Nikon D200 when shooting in raw produced files of about 16mb.
My 400D used to produce files of about 12 meg in raw, and my D80 produced files of about 12 meg in compressed raw.
I find it hard to believe that the D200 added data to the raw files so, I can only assume, given that these are all 10mp cameras, the Canon raw must be discarding something!

Any technical people have any idea?

 

[Gandhi]

Nefs have a low quality, basic JPEg embedded but that's not gonna bump the file size up that much.

AFAIK, canons RAW files are compressed, but there is also an option to do this with the d200. I use it all the time and there is no noticeable loss in quality in the raw file.

 

[Steep]

I reckon the D200 would have a bigger sensor (i.e. more pixels) than the 400d or d80 that would count for a lot of the size.

 

[Chappers]

Canon RAW files use a lossless compression method, as do most RAW files