Had a play with a *istD in a local camera store today. I'd have to say I was impressed.
I took along my CF card to grab some shots, and took a few RAW files to have a peek at. For anyone who is interested in technical details, these are in fact TIFF files with a .PEF extension. Most TIFF loading someware won't directly work with them, as they are 12bit/channel, and have only a single channel. The Photometric identifier is also something I don't recognise, and isn't documented in the TIFF headers... no doubt some GRGB bayer photometric. Hopefully Pentax will make documentation of custom photometric IDs and tiff tags available. In any case, this makes the files trivial to parse and load for us third party types, well done again Pentax. My only complaint is that the 12 bit data is padded to 16 bit. This makes the raw file bigger than it needs to be; they are over 12MB, where they should only need to be 9MB or so. This reduces storage on CF, and slows write times, seemingly unnecesarily. If anyone at Pentax is listening, please could we have non-padded PEF files? It may also be of interest that the PEF file seems to be 3040x2024 resolution, with all pixels seemingly active. Various other RAW files I've used have the entire sensor area (which Pentax quote as 3110x2030), but have black (masked) areas present. I am not sure yet if the PEF contains the appropriate ICC profile to correctly convert the file. Love, Light and Peace, - Peter Loveday Director of Development, eyeon Software
