I see the A-5 is listed as having a Proprietary Raw Data Format an is considerably less thant 1 meg. Does that mean there is interpretation??? Also does that mean that Picture Editors such as Photoshop 4 will not properly edit them????

-- James Gaskins (mij@ij.net), June 15, 1998

Answers

James-

Actually, ALL current digicams do some interpolation: Think about it - a camera with 1.5 megapixel sensor makes a 1.5 megapixel file. Sounds fine, right? Not when you consider that the array is "striped" to separate it into R, G, B colors. Actually, there are only 500K "real" pixels in that example. (Not strictly true, as you can definitely extract some luminance information, regardless of color filtration.)

What the A5's raw format does is just grab all the data exactly as it comes from the array. The Canon software can then unpack it and make an uncompressed file on your computer that at least won't have any of the JPEG artifacts in it. Yes, Photoshop won't open the "raw" file, but that's not a killer, since you the Canon software can unstuff it to a TIFF, etc. Polaroid uses a similar "raw" format, in their "Polaroid Digital Negative" (PDN) format. I expect others will too - wish more would offer it as an option!

-- Dave Etchells (hotnews@imaging-resource.com), June 15, 1998.