AcdSee do not bother to support Pentax K-7 raw-format

[Howard]

As You may have noticed AccSee software do not support K-7 raw-files.

At the 20th of september I sent them this letter:

"Customer (Howard Frisell) - 09/20/2009 02:47 PM
Your filebrowser in Pro 2,5 had no problem reading and showing the raw-files from my Pentax K20D, but both the DNG and PEF raw-files from my new Pentax K-7 first show up clearly for som few sconds in both the browser- and RAW editing-window, but soon turning black. This makes your product useless to me. Can you correct this?"

The respons was:

"Thank you for contacting ACD Systems Customer Support.

Although the “ Pentax K-7 ” is not currently included within the camera models supported by ACDSee Pro 2, we hope to update the RAW decoder to include this camera in the future. At present there is not a timeline for its inclusion, but as a result of customer inquiries, we are working to include this camera model.


Regards,
Marie-Ève P.

Customer Support
ACD Systems"

1 Month has passed. So today i bought their new version 3.0. Installed it and sent this letter to them:

"Today i bought, downloaded and installed version 3 of AcdSee pro, just to experience that you still do not bother to include Pentax K-7 raw support. I complained abouth this with version 2,5 a exactly a month ago in "Incident: 090920-000034". Your respond was all but positive, promicing no timeline to this.
I just want to say I am terribly dissapointed with you. I am a certified PC, Microsoft and Pentax Digital Dealer in my town. I can not any more recommend AcdSee software to my customers.
I will also publish a copy of this letter on my Facebook page, The international: PentaxForums.com - The Largest Pentax-Dedicated Photography Forum Community- Home page and on the Norwegian Photo Pro page: Foto.no - Hovedsiden. Please notice me when you want me to follow up on these postings, with some positive news.
I am also aware the you for years have been shipping your software with most Pentax Cameras. It surprises me that you tend to neglect Pentax now. Pentax Europe, the Norwegian Pentax pro-shop: Fovi AS and Pentax importer: Aronsen AS has now been noticed of my findings.

Your software is at this time useless to me. If you do not have the will or skills to support this RAW-format, I will be forced to ask for a refund both on version 2009, 2 (2.5) and upgrade to 3.0"

If this can`t hurry their so called "timeline", nothing will. At the moment I must beg You all not to buy any AcdSee software to this "timeline" is corrected. My English may not be to good, but my anger is real

[lurchlarson]

Don't worry about your english. It is actually very good. The message was clear and forceful but still carried a very professional tone. Hopefully they will respond with support. I don't know how big their market is, but if they make a lot of money from Canon and Nikon users than it might cost them more money to take the time to write the code necessary to support Pentax than to it would to ignore the problem.

[raz-0]

Gee, a whole month eh? And a new release was in the works?

And they didn't introduce anything new at the last minute to slow down the process and screw up QA?

I'm shocked I tell you.

New models come out, and it takes time to support them. ESPECIALLY if the camera manufacturer isn't supportive in getting them technical support to suppor their products. If this were the case, it would not be the first time Pentax snubbed some of the smaller software manufacturers.

We had to wait for k20d support in adobe software, and they have a heck of a lot more developers working for them than ACDsee.

[Marc Sabatella]

ACDSee tends to put out new RAW plugin updates every 3-5 months. Last one was about 3 months ago, and during that time they released Pro 3.0. So based on that, I'd be expecting to see it sometime in the next couple of months.

[woodworm]

I think ACDSee is based on dcraw which is an open source RAW decoder (many other programs use this as well such as Picasa). If you visit the dcraw web-site you will see the K-7 is listed as a compatible camera so I would imagine ACDSee will implement this in the next update.

I used to use Picasa but that doesn't support the GX20 RAW files (even in the latest release) so had to change to Lightroom.

[Marc Sabatella]

The thing is, support for a given camera isn't just about being able to read the format - it's tunign the application to actually produce good results for it in various types of images. getting it working *well* is what takes time. And they can't release support ebfore that happens, or else RAW processing done before the tuning has taken place will cease to look right after the software has been tuned for the camera. But if you want to shortcut that process and don't mind the processing perhaps changing in apearance later, it generally works to shoot DNG (or shoot PEF and convert to DNG). I know some people have tried this with varying degrees of success - I don't remember what issues they might have encountered.

Sometimes it also works to hack the image files to fool the software into thinking it came from another similar camera, although I don't know that the K-7 is similar enough to the K20D for this to have any chance of working (worked for the K100D Super as compared to K100D, though - that sort of thing).