Why are there so many raw formats?

[Tuolumne]

Why do camera manufacturers find the need to each have their own raw format, complicating the lives of so many needlessly? I can't think of any proprietary advantage this gives them, and it makes using your favorite digital editing software a hassle.

/T

[sojournerphoto]

History and pride - the Japanese hae a very proud culture and they drive the development of raw formats

Mike

[Tuolumne]

The Japanese are also very active in standards bodies. Why not in this case?

/T

[sojournerphoto]

Lots of bodies... fwiw CR2 is based on tiff and contains no sharpening or software based noise reduction... Nikon uses some clever compression and does different things to canon on black levels

[Tuolumne]

Lots of bodies... fwiw CR2 is based on tiff and contains no sharpening or software based noise reduction... Nikon uses some clever compression and does different things to canon on black levels

I thought the whole idea behind raw was just to deliver what the sensor sees with no additional manipulation? Of course, since the sensor "sees" nothing without software processing the distinction is hard to maintain.

/T

[sojournerphoto]

yes, that's the idea. However, some manufacturers have sharpened raw files in camera and some have applied noise reduction to raw files in camera. All dslrs have electronic nr on chip in any case.

Mike

[mark-b]

The fact that there are so many different RAW formats drives the argument against archiving your photographs in RAW. Years from now, will that certain RAW format be readable?

I archive my photos in both JPEG and TIFF.

[Al Kaplan]

Look how many varieties of of roll film there were early in the 20th century, and most are gone: 828, 120, 620, 127, 116, 616, 118, 122. There were bunches of sheet film sizes, both inches and metric. I suspect that there'll be a shake-out of digital formats too.

[bmattock]

The fact that there are so many different RAW formats drives the argument against archiving your photographs in RAW. Years from now, will that certain RAW format be readable?

I archive my photos in both JPEG and TIFF.

You could convert to DNG.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Negative_(file_format)

Of course, as digital data, the onus is on your to not let your data fall into a state whereby it could not be upconverted. This is not a fault of digital, but a failure by humans to establish requirements and then develop and implement a plan to meet those requirements.

http://www.openraw.org/info

[Socke]

The fact that there are so many different RAW formats drives the argument against archiving your photographs in RAW. Years from now, will that certain RAW format be readable?

I archive my photos in both JPEG and TIFF.

Yes, thanks to dcraw which is open source. As long as you find a way to compile gcc and glibc you'll be able to compile dcraw to decode your raw files.
DCRAW has been ported to anything from a MIPS based CPU running some flavor of Linux to an 8 Socket IBM server with 32 cores running Windows Server 2008.

Open Source and open formats are the guarantee for long time storage.

I myself ported it to an old HP Visualise FX Workstation running HP UX 11.2.