P6000 announced

[ptomsu]

Jorgen,

MS approach to image format support is actually quite open - MS provides the platform, camera vendors make codecs (or plugins if you will).

Question remaining for me is: will Apple ever support this format? I do not think so.

Thus the P6000 is dead for me (unfortunately) before it is even on the market.

So again - in my eyes a stupid decision to rely only on this RAW format.

 

[tetsrfun]

"Thomas Knoll - 8:19pm Aug 7, 08 PST (#4 of 10)

WIC is Windows only.

Even on Windows, WIC is basically useless for Camera Raw/Lightroom type applications. "

http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b61a1b

Maybe Thomas Knoll is "blowing smoke" but maybe he isn't.

Steve

 

[Jorgen Udvang]

One of the rumours I've found, and mind you, it's only a rumour, is that it's payback time for camera manufacturers. We know that MS is requiring payments for the FAT standards that Nikon & Co have been using for free for many years, but who knows what other legal claims they have up their sleeve.

Since MS has more money than they can ever hope to spend anyway, one way to go would be to "offer" camera makers to use their standard for RAW conversion instead of paying, connecting photographers to Windows and not to that fruit brand.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was true.

 

[Lars]

Well, MS behaves like any large corporation in a dominant market position, set your expectations accordingly. As an end user, I don't care if MS charges camera manufacturers for technology licensing. There is so much of that going on everywhere. I care about the bottom line - the camera pricetag.

Some good comments by Jeff Schewe and others in the thread Steve linked to above.

I have to disagree with Thomas' comment in that thread though, WIC itself isn't useless (I have used it experimentally myself to do raw conversion in my software), rather Thomas wanted a cross platform solution to raw processing and wanted independence from the camera manufacturers. By cutting the band to the camera manufacturer he ended up with Adobe's raw conversion screwing up the colors in our photos for years. Now finally Adobe is working on a "profile" solution to patch up the problem. Had Adobe not gone their own way but instead decided to work with the camera manufacturers (through WIC or other interface) we would have had good color in Adobe's products from day one.

But it's a bit of a chicken/egg scenario - without Adobe using WIC there is less pressure for WIC to evolve, and the interest in providing good codecs is moderate at best. And without good codecs available, who wants to build WIC-compatible software? I don't, not for now at least. So in the end, where MS screwed up with WIC is on the market alliance side - had MS acted humbly and worked with software vendors like Adobe and others to ensure that WIC met vendors' needs then perhaps things would have looked differently today.

Instead, the situation we have now means that every time a new camera comes out, all raw developer makers have to update their softwares to support the new camera models - not only format, mind you, but also color interpretation. This makes it almost impossible for a small software maker like myself to compete in raw conversion. We went through this at Light Crafts, renting cameras and profiling, and releasing a patch for every new camera model. Believe me, it's a royal PITA. Had there instead been a good and popular codec platform, then making a raw developer module would have been a walk in the park.

So MS approach with WIC failed mostly because MS provided an open platform for others to use but failed to make it popular among software makers.

Apple's approach OTOH is a bit of the opposite. Apple likes to stay in control, provide a closed system so it can control all aspects of the user experience. This means Apple has to invest more in updates to its software platform. The outcome is clear though - built-in support for raw format is better in OSX than in Windows.

So in the end (so far), the Apple's closed platform approach provides a better value for the end users than MS open platform. Draw your own political analogies hehe

 

[Jorgen Udvang]

One of the main problems with anything coming from MS, is that end users have experienced too many broken promises from them, and too many complicated new products or upgrades to existing ones that haven't really helped users anywhere. Rather the opposite sometimes. How many versions of Windows have there been since 95? At least nine, and then there are the unavoidable service packs.

End users want something that works year after year, with little or no need for upgrades. My G4 Cube is such a machine. I never upgraded the OS, and except for the occasional bomb, it just kept on functioning until the power supply gave in after seven years.

That's the kind of supplier I want, and that's the kind of supplier Nikon has been in my eyes. A bit slow and very conservative, but I know that most products from their hands are stable platforms for my work and hobby.

So when they form an alliance with a software developer who has a reputation like MS has, my, and apparently many others' first thought is: I'm not in on this.

Seen from a publicity point of view, that's as bad a start as you can get, and although not all potential P6000-customers read forums on the internet discussing these issues, many do. That will affect sales.

Hopefully, it's possible to change the RAW format with a new firmware release. If it isn't, I think we'll see a P6100 very soon. But if Canon launches a G10 at Fotokina, that may be too late already.

 

[Lars]

Here is an interesting thread on this subject, with some Bibble engineers commenting:

http://support.bibblelabs.com/webboard/viewtopic.php?t=11072

 

[ptomsu]

Here is an interesting thread on this subject, with some Bibble engineers commenting:

http://support.bibblelabs.com/webboard/viewtopic.php?t=11072

Thanks for this link - very good info and actually confirms what I was thinking

For me as for many others waiting for a compact Nikon P&S with RAW capabilities this is obviously the show stopper. Bad for Nikon :ROTFL:

I will wait till the Canon G10 arrives, how it looks and what it supports and then decide to get either the G10 or the Panasonic LX3.

 

[Lars]

An update: As expected, Adobe's and Apple's latest raw format updates now support P6000.

 

[Oxide Blu]

An update: As expected, Adobe's and Apple's latest raw format updates now support P6000.

Yup. A company (Nikon) doesn't dedicate the resources to designing a new data format for a single unit in a market were the competition's product (and thus, your own line of product) changes frequently. No idea where Nikon is going with this new RAW format but you can expect to see it in many more cameras. It would be foolish for MS, Apple, Adobe and everyone else not to get on board asap. And it would be foolish for Nikon to introduce a new format without knowing that MS, Apple, Adobe, etc are already committed to supporting that format. Wouldn't be surprised if the 3rd parties had the format spec a year before Nikon released the P6000.