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RAW vs YUV, and who owns the ISP

RAW is evidence. YUV is a finished sentence.
12 September 2026 by

RAW is the wells, more or less. YUV (and MJPEG, and "the camera looks like a webcam") is someone else's opinion of those wells. The someone else is an ISP: on the sensor, on a companion chip, or on the host. Output format is who owns the picture.

Engineering bench with a camera module and a laptop showing a processed colour image
If the ISP already decided the colour, you can still tune a little. You cannot undo a decision that threw the raw away.

In one sentence. RAW is evidence. YUV is a finished sentence. Pick the one you are willing to live with when the light goes wrong.

When you want RAW

You will run your own pipeline, you care about HDR merge, you will calibrate colour, you will do photometry. Then you want the wells, a known black level, and a host that can take the bandwidth. MIPI RAW10/12 is the usual industrial answer.

When YUV is honest

You want a UVC camera that works on Tuesday. You accept that auto-exposure and auto-white-balance will have moods. That is a product, not a failure, as long as you do not then ask why the aisle goes dark when a window enters the frame.

How to read the page

Camemaker sensors list Output Format and Interfaces. Read them as a pair. A part that can do RAW and YUV is two products depending on how you clock it. The older Flyingchip note on this blog is what happens when you take that ISP seriously instead of treating it as furniture.

Focus type: fixed, set-once, and motors
If the distance will not sit still, the glass has to travel.