Hi Jason, if every device out there fully conformed to DNG, DNG supported all the specifics of each and every device, and all software fully supported DNG: Yes.
In practice that's not the case. RAW formats are tied to the actual implementation of the camera sensor itself. There have been several attempts to come up with a standard format which supports every image sensor imaginable, DNG for example is an extension of the earlier TIFF/EP. There will always be something missing from the common standard, e.g. TIFF/EP and DNG assume that the image sensor has a color filter array which uses Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow or White filters. This is not true for all sensors out there, e.g. Sigma cameras with a Foveon sensors don't have a color filter array, SuperCCD sensors have color filters which are rotated by 45 degrees, etc. Some manufacturers also use specific or proprietary algorithms which not every piece of software can implement, so you couldn't read the image even though the software supports DNG. If you go the level where you care about the RAW data instead of RGB pixels, everybody does something different all the time. The same is true for device options, settings, metdata values etc. which do not exist on all devices yet have to be stored. A good example for this are all the proprietary extensions to the Exif standard (https://sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/TagNames/) which were created because people couldn't find a way to store their data in the standard tags. I can't say much about how long it takes to implement support for all the different RAW formats, but most manufacturers try to stick to their existing RAW formats as long as possible. So not every new device requires a full re-write. cheers, Simon On 23.10.18 01:26, Jason Polak wrote: > Dear List, > > This is mainly for the devs: I was just wondering if all cameras shot in > DNG format, would that make adding support for cameras much easier? In > other words, does it take a lot of time to add new support for each > camera's Raw format? > > Jason > ___________________________________________________________________________ > darktable developer mailing list > to unsubscribe send a mail to darktable-dev+unsubscr...@lists.darktable.org > ___________________________________________________________________________ darktable developer mailing list to unsubscribe send a mail to darktable-dev+unsubscr...@lists.darktable.org
