RAW Format Future?
UPDATE: Adobe release DNG
Sometime in the mid-1980's I attempted to open one of my old, circa-1985 Word documents using the version of Word then current: 6.0 It didn't work. --- In the Beginning Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson
Canon are changing the RAW format as they release newer cameras. My first encounter with this was with the S60.
The only program I have, which can read S60 RAW files, is the Canon Zoom Browser. I believe this is the one piece of software that can access the photos I shoot.
So, the bad feeling begins.
RAW files are not standardised. Each camera will have its own RAW format depending on the sensor. At what point will the photos become inaccessible? Will Adobe, Phase One, or Canon keep making backwardly compatible tools? Willing to bet your archive of photos on that?
Perhaps in the future we'll all be running Windows emulators on Linux just to access some of our photos from the turn of the millenium.
- rawformat - a blog discussing RAW format
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Try that : http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/ Canon S60 work with it. dcraw.c is C source code, so future is ok.
Sadly not yet. Hopefully, someone will be able to reverse engineer the S60 RAW file format. However, for the future Dave Coffin's work is invaluable.
It is not in the DCRAW compatibility list, but I have an S60 and it work if you disable "camera balance" option. But of course I think a STANDARD RAW format would be a very good thing.