Harron Says:
April 20th, 2005 at 10:19 am
My apologies to those who have already read my words over at the Adobe PS Win forum.
I do some technical (and non-technical) writing for camera companies and would like to offer some perspective.
As a Nikon DSLR and Photoshop/Camera Raw user, I am angry with Nikon for being uncooperative. I think they are misguided. However, I fully understand why camera makers would want to maintain control over the interpretation of RAW data. It has nothing to do with increasing corporate revenues by getting into the software business and everything to do with maintaining product differentiation in a highly competitive market that appears to be headed toward parity. Manufacturers want to avoid a situation in which pricing becomes their number one weapon in the market share wars.
Its easy to make the sensor-film analogy, saying that camera makers need only concentrate on what happens until the light rays of the latent image strike the film/sensor plane. But digital camera design is far more complex.
Put aside RAW capture for the moment. Camera makers have long ago discovered that post-processing specifically, the algorithms used in the digital signal processor downstream from the sensor can have as much effect on image quality as the optics and the sensor itself. Noise, for example, assumed by many to be generated entirely by the sensor, can just as easily be caused by calculation errors at the DSP stage. Moreover, user feel-good factors such as camera responsiveness, battery life, and overall ease of use are essentially determined by the DSP. Guess what, folks? Its all about the software.
There are many more camera manufacturers than there are sensor manufacturers, which means you very often find the same sensor in multiple camera models from multiple manufacturers. Yes, there are many areas other than sensor technology by which a camera maker can distinguish its products. One of those is software
or, more precisely, firmware. Camera makers have invested a lot of money into DSP technology, including software development. To neglect that aspect of digicam design would be tantamount to corporate suicide. The ones that have their own LSI capabilities have gone so far as to design and fabricate their own DSP chips with proprietary architectures. (Canon, with their Digic chip, comes to mind as an example.) But, here again, the hardware is not the story.
So, now, we come back to RAW capture. It really isnt that difficult, in light of the above, to understand camera makers desire to maintain some control over the capture data especially after they leave the sensor. We can argue until were blue in the face that its simply wrong to go proprietary in RAW formatting, but convincing a camera maker of that, I think, is going to be a major uphill battle. Theyve invested money in the software end of things not because they thought it would be a neat idea but rather because they saw that their very existence depended on it. Would you give it up that easily?
I dont have any answers nor a crystal ball. As a user, I hope for a certain outcome
but Im not holding my breath.
=-= Harron =-=
