HDR: JPG only? Zoomed in? Long time to store?

[Astigmatism]

There are three things that surprise me about taking HDR photos. 1) Even though the camera is set for HIF images, and does save HIF images for ordinary “S” shots, on “HDR” it saves a JPG instead. 2) The HDR JPG image is zoomed in slightly, compared to the HIF. 3) In HDR mode the display says it’s storing the image for a couple seconds, a surprisingly long time.

 

This is from a quick experiment with a fixed focal length lens on a tripod, manually set at ISO 320, f/2.5, 1/320 s. I shot a contrasty scene with bright highlights and dark shadows. All this was with XF33mmF1.4 R LM WR on an X-T5.

 

I looked around in the manual and in the excellent Tony Phillips book for hints but came up empty. Can anybody enlighten me?

[Greybeard]

I don't know why the image is stored as jpg - but it takes a while to store the image because it has quite a lot of work to do in taking three images and combining them.

If you shoot raw + jpeg it gives you the three raw images together in one large RAF file.

[pw-pix]

Maybe it "zooms in" becuase it crops slightly as part of the alignment process of the exposure bracketed stack?

[MARRIEDGUY9]

I think Pal2tech has an excellent video on how HDR files are stored.