On Feb 13, 2006, at 10:11 AM, Dario Bonazza wrote:
Some in-camera JPEG processors are better than others.
Surely true. Although by and large the differences in in-camera JPEG rendering are more a matter of what trade-offs the manufacturer made with respect to their expected audience.
Pentax designed the in-camera JPEG rendering defaults of the DS et al to produce very high quality 4x6 prints straight out of the camera, not to be the ultimate settings for image post-processing and large size prints. Canon's defaults on the 10D and 20D JPEGs are much more attuned to the notion of editing, leaving much more overhead for sharpening, and differ from the defaults on the 300D and 350XT which are more like the Pentax.
For all of these cameras, you modify the JPEG rendering engine's settings to meet the needs you have if you want to produce better files for editing, or you go to RAW format and do the rendering yourself. It's no surprise that Pentax supplied RAW conversion software uses algorithms similar to what the camera does, just like Canon's RAW conversion software uses algorithms similar to what their cameras do.
*ANY* JPEG rendering from [EMAIL PROTECTED] RAW data is tossing 40-60% of the data away. It's in the nature of the conversion process, which does gamma correction, chroma interpolation, and reduction to [EMAIL PROTECTED] RGB color space, then JPEG compression. What parameters you set in the algorithms determine the quality of the final output, and have to be optimized for specific purposes.
Godfrey
