>From: Steve Jolly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> Proprietary file formats are a bad idea. My PDA reads JPEG, dammit! >> Hopefully, Raw formats will standardize and become availible to >> programmers outside of the company that originated them.
>My understanding is that the RAW format is literally the raw data read >straight off the sensor. A "standard" RAW format would be next to >impossible, as it would have to take into account every possible future >advance in sensor technology. Probably not quite the case. Consider what the camera is likely to actually store as "raw". The data straight off the sensor would presumably be a collection of small integers indicating the amount of light that struck each pixel, plus perhaps some data about how the camera was set up and how the bayer grid was arranged. If you had a header that accounted for camera parameters (as the JPEG header can hold EXIF) and then a raw format body that began with a simple header that said "a times b integers 0-255 follow" you could handle any resolution sensor trivially. You could use the same data organization (file format) regardless of the amount of data. Really all a CCD does is to react simply to light exposure, just as a film "grain" does. DJE
