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We asked camera companies why their RAW formats are all different and confusing

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361 points Tomte | 1 comments | 04 Apr 25 11:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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Scaevolus ◴[04 Apr 25 15:57 UTC] No.43584261[source]▶
Ultimately, RAW formats aren't that complex, and camera firmware is mostly developed in countries that don't have strong open source software traditions.

Look at the decoders for each format that darktable supports here: https://github.com/darktable-org/rawspeed/tree/develop/src/l...

It's some binary parsing, reading metadata, maybe doing some decompression-- a thousand lines of C++ on average for each format. These aren't complex codecs like HEVC and only reach JPEG complexity by embedding them as thumbnails!

Cameras absolutely could emit DNG instead, but that would require more development friction: coordination (with Adobe), potentially a language barrier, and potentially making it harder to do experimental features.

Photographers rarely care, so it doesn't appreciably impact sales. Raw processing software packages have generally good support available soon after new cameras are released.

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weinzierl ◴[07 Apr 25 08:30 UTC] No.43609169[source]▶
I always thought camera RAW formats were optimize continuous shooting rates. About being able to linearly write an image as fast as possible.

I don't know the details of DNG but even the slightest complication could be a no-go for some manufacturers.

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tmoravec ◴[07 Apr 25 11:00 UTC] No.43609926[source]▶
The bottleneck is usually in SD card write speeds, however. Sport photographers often skip raw and only use JPG because the files are smaller and as a result, one can take more photos in one burst.
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1. tomatocracy ◴[07 Apr 25 11:30 UTC] No.43610099[source]▶
For raw at high frame rates, high end cameras don't use SD cards but things like CFexpress which absolutely can keep up (and there are also various compressed RAW formats these days which apply a degree of lossy compression to reduce file size).

As I understand it, the reason some professional sports photographers don't shoot RAW (or it's less important) is more because they are in an environment where publishing quickly is important, so upload speeds matter and there isn't really much time to postprocess.