[Gooshin]

NOPE, it's just so Adobe doesn't have to liscense or reverse engineer every new format. Problem is DNG leaves such gaping holes to cater to individual vendors that DNG is still partially propriatory anyways. Something manufacturers don't want to give up. Most RAW is just deviations of the TIFF standard anyways and will probably always be able to reverse engineer images based on that...
And as a faithful Corel users, and to all those Silkpics Rawtherapee people, hurray for competition!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I reject your Adobe-centric world.........

a long time ago a successful man was someone that could hunt, chop wood, and invade other nations while taking care of his family

some time ago, a good business was one that had inhouse development of their products from start to finish

today this is not the case, successfully businesses are those that focus on core competencies and outsource tasks that they are less than perfect at.

there are only so many smart people in the world that could head divisions to brilliance, most companies that still try to maintain their grasp on every stage of development and production are mediocre at best unless their head hunters happen to recruite the best employees.

Pentax makes wonderful cameras and amazing glass, why should their development team be burdened with endlessly developing a raw converter for their sub-par image processing software when you have a mega developer who's core business is the development of image processing software asking you nicely to just please use their algorithims!

even if we take adobe out of the equation, all of the major image processing software programs are still going to have to keep making updates so that they work with all of the camera manufacturers, its not like Corel is built for PEF only!


if pentax honestly thinks that they can build a better raw converter and image processing software than Adobe then i dont know what to say... lost? confused? seriously people.


this is beyond capitalism, this is specialization.

[BrendanPK]

great my camera will blue-screen now

[Matjazz]

if pentax honestly thinks that they can build a better raw converter and image processing software than Adobe then i dont know what to say... lost? confused? seriously people.

Each user can decide for him/her self whether adobe raw and ps is the best or not. Most people use it just because most people use it (herd urge).

[Lowell Goudge]

Not to offend any microsoft employees, but given the present perception of microsoft, I can see the following things with a pentax camera powered by microsoft.

The good, there would be lots of firmware updates offering the chance of getting some things we really want in the camera

The bad, there would be lots of firmware updates because of all the bugs in the software

the ugly, there would be lots of firmware updates because we would now have viruses on the cameras (since I assume e-mail and web access would be part of the update) and there would be patches to plug all the leaks.

I could add the really ugly, every year the camera would grow in size weight and power requirements to account for the additional features that only 0.0001 % of the people would use but marketing would promote as the latest thing.

[cpopham]

adobe tries its best to be accomodating, they go out of their way to allow their programs to work with all the silly pef's and nef's and what not, but they have been pushing since day one to standardize raw out put format, so that ALL the developers inloved have less of a headache to deal with IN THE LONG RUN.

Yes, because Adobe is completely altruistic and this isn't all actually about running a business and making money... if Adobe doesn't support the native RAW formats, somebody else will, and that company will make money. At the same time, they'd like to have a format they are in control of...... kind of like how the camera manufacturers have proprietary RAW formats.....

And, seriously, it's not so that "ALL the developers involved have less of a headache", it's so that Adobe's developers have less of a headache...

well they already have the groundwork in place, which they stopped throwing any money at (tough to throw any cash at anything when you have so little to spare.. smirk..). Sorry I find it hard to respect "frugal" when your GNP dwarfs most countries........
Maybe their code is just a POS so why support it?
Download details: Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for Windows XP

I was referring to Pentax keeping spending on software low, not Microsoft. As for why the XP RAW thumbnailer doesn't support most formats.... it's from 2005... WIC wasn't available until late 2006. So it's not a case of "the groundwork in place" as you say, but a stopgap until a proper solution later - which exists, and is in Vista.

From Microsoft's point of view though... why should they work on backporting features of Vista to XP?

If I was a Microsoft shareholder (and I am not) and they "threw cash around" on things like that I'd be rather unhappy about it.

What I don't understand is all the hysteria and hate for companies in this thread.
Like all software companies, Microsoft does some cool stuff, some good stuff, some boring stuff, and some bad stuff. Sometimes they make business decisions you might not like... but it's not exactly personal either...

As for what Pentax might be licensing from Microsoft, Microsoft Research does all sorts of interesting and random things you might not expect. A quick search finds something which might be quite nice in a point and shoot....

Digital Photography with Flash and No-Flash Image Pairs - papers_0346

*Disclaimer: I work in the software industry, but not imaging, or for any company mentioned in this thread

[creampuff]

I think we need to separate whatever rants and emotive feelings some of us may have against Microsoft and objectively weigh the potential benefits of JPEG XR, which I think is a positive development.

Turf war between Microsoft's JPEG XR and Adobe's DNG? | Underexposed - CNET News.com

Extract from the above article:

JPEG XR will be used in a much larger, mainstream photography market. DNG and raw, in comparison, appeal chiefly to professionals and advanced amateurs today, and no matter how easy processing those images may become once downloaded from a camera, any amount of processing will rule out a large population.

JPEG XR does address one advantage of raw and DNG, the ability to preserve more of the original data from image sensors. JPEG retains 8 bits of data for the blue, red and green in each pixel, but cameras typically record 12 bits, with Canon's new 1D Mark III recording 14 bits and higher-end models 16 bits.

JPEG XR, though, has immense bit depth--with 16 or 32 bits of data recorded for each pixel's color, that means somewhere between 65,536 and 4,294,967,296 shades of tonal variation between black and white. Thus the "XR," or extended range, moniker. Regular 8-bit JPEG has 256 shades, which is plenty if they happen to be distributed perfectly, but not enough if you want to use photo-editing software to brighten up a face that's lost in shadow.

However, DNG and raw formats offer something JPEG XR can't: unprocessed data. Creating a JPEG XR image means the camera is making its best guess about color balance--compensating for the bluish hue of fluorescent lights or the orange cast of incandescent, for example--as well as reducing noise and sharpening edges. For those who want that level of control, stick with raw or DNG.

[Arpe]

It'd be a bugger shooting away, then the camera freezing up. Having to turn it off, wait 30 seconds then turn it on again, waiting 5 minutes for it to boot up, then we're away!

[Maxington]

Could be worse, they could team up with Apple, and you'd have to buy Apple memory cards at 6x the price, you'd have to send your camera to Apple to change the battery, but at least the camera body would be really thin and sexy! Ok, it would also be twice as expensive as the competitors for no actual advantage. And the images could only be edited with iTunes. And the body would be white. And glossy.

Or Pentax could team up with a Linux distro, and you'd put in a memory card, and it wouldn't be recognized, so you'd spend a few days online chasing drivers for it, then another few days manually inputting a command line to set it up, assuming someone else has coded them. And there'd be forty different version of the camera bodies, each with a different setup, and comes free with their own fanboys!

Are all the tired OS jokes done yet?

[PDL]

Microsoft has done this before -- made the hardware manufacturers write their own drivers. It happened with windows v2.0 - printer drivers. If you remember, when MS-DOS was king, each software vendor wrote its own drivers for printers. (Mine was an Epson MX-80). After a while, most of the disks with new software (not MS-DOS) were filled with specific printer drivers. With Windows, MS came out with a printer interface that all (Windows) applications used - an API. From that point on, the software manufacturers did not have to create printer drivers for each variation of printer on the market. The printer vendors write the drivers and they work from all applications. So when Vista came out – people bitched long and loud about MS not supporting my <enter printer name here> when it was the VENDOR who writes the drivers. Sheesh.

Now with WIC, Microsoft has put the burden of accessing and using proprietary image formats on the camera vendors. As each new camera comes out with a new slightly different file format (hint - K10D->K20D) it is up to the vendor to provide the interface to WIC aware programs. Hence MS wrote the codec’s for BMP, TIFF, JPEG and others (review the MS documentation for additional information). MS did not write the codec’s for Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, Pentax or Olympus. There is a third party creating a codec for DNG - because Adobe does not want to give its stuff away, or they do not want to play in MS's sandbox.

Microsoft killed its Digital Imaging Suite - which was supposed to be the first fully WIC aware product available. If you go out to the MS pro photo page - everything is Adobe, Canon and Nikon. Pentax is not much of a player here since they tend to see codec’s as "patches". On DPR there was a thread where JohnCPentax claimed that Pentax had given its specs to MS and expected MS to release a new codec in a few months. Pentax does not get it - Pentax is the responsible code generator here - not MS.

If Hoya has made a license agreement with MS - it is possibly for the JPEG-XR code to put in the on-board chip. We just might be able to have JPEG, JPEG-XR, DNG and PEF as choices in the future. Now that could be a good thing.

The Elitist - formerly known as PDL

[monochrome]

It'd be a bugger shooting away, then the camera freezing up. Having to turn it off, wait 30 seconds then turn it on again, waiting 5 minutes for it to boot up, then we're away!

Would DPR suspend its review of the K40D after receiving a second sample that mysteriously got the blue screen of death in LiveView - that nobody but an Eastern European website cold replicate?

[Venturi]

Hmm, the one important(?) thing that sticks in my mind with this whole thing is that Hoya is sinking new money into Pentax. Doesn't that at least to some degree put the kibosh on rumors that Pentax Imaging might not have a bright future under Hoya?

[ogl]

I think that nothing interesting and they will use new formats of files or codecs for digital PS cameras or something else...and not above...
Microsoft and Hoya Pentax Join Forces - PhotographyBLOG

Over the past two years, Microsoft has entered into similar agreements with Alpine Electronics Inc., Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd., Kenwood Corp., Kyocera Mita Corp., LG Electronics, NEC Corp., Nortel Networks, Novell Inc., Olympus Corp., Onkyo Corp., Samsung Electronics America Inc., Seiko Epson Corp. and Victor Company of Japan Ltd.

Microsoft had already the same agreement with Olympus and Samsung for 2 years. And what?

[filmamigo]

Don't Canon's DSLRs run MS-DOS on their microcontrollers?

[ricardobeat]

That's very good news. After all we are well used to those nice blue screens.

Which happen to be mostly caused by using cheap memory on your PC... try some ECC/registered memory and you'll seldomly have a crash

I thought of JPEG-XR too, but would guess this won't bring nothing new besides better integration between Pentax software and Windows, mostly for P&S.

[filmamigo]

Venturi -- My thoughts exactly. Hoya wouldn't invest in patent protection if they just wanted to dump Pentax.