Amin
Hall of Famer
Back in 2007, I blogged about how Canon was letting down photography enthusiasts. At that time, I was reacting to the fact that Canon had dropped RAW support from the venerable Powershot G series:
Five years have passed since I wrote that, and today most people are using phones as their day-to-day pocket cameras. Phone camera quality has come a long way. There is no longer any doubt that phones can be used for quality photography, so I have to ask Apple, Samsung, HTC, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, LG, Google, and Dell: Where is the RAW support?
If you poke around the various phone forums, you'll occasionally find people asking this question, and in nearly every case, you'll find a know-it-all response that there is no point to adding RAW support to these phones. The JPEG engine is extracting every last bit of information, they'll say. All it would do is increase the processing requirements and lower performance. The sensors are too small, and the pixel counts too high.
None of this is any more true for today's phones than it was for the Canon G7.
Every time I take a photo with my Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the JPEG goes straight to my Google cloud storage. When I get home, the RAW file ought to be sitting there in my Lightroom library. We have the technology, and there's no doubting the usefulness. It's all long overdue.
Canon representative Chuck Westfall recently gave an explanation for the absence of RAW in Canon's flagship G7. Basically he said that as a result of Canon stuffing so many pixels into a small sensor, the RAW material isn't good enough to yield any better results than DIGIC III is extracting in the in-camera processing. As any RAW shooter knows, he is full of it. Shooting RAW is not just about getting better results, it's about flexibility. When I shoot RAW, I can choose my white balance, sharpening settings, and noise reduction after the shot. I can also process using the enitre dynamic/tonal range that was captured. With the G7, every bit of this has been determined during the shot. If I look at the ISO 400 shot on my computer later and want a B&W conversion where I'd be willing to accept greater noise for greater detail, too bad, the choice has been made.
Five years have passed since I wrote that, and today most people are using phones as their day-to-day pocket cameras. Phone camera quality has come a long way. There is no longer any doubt that phones can be used for quality photography, so I have to ask Apple, Samsung, HTC, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, LG, Google, and Dell: Where is the RAW support?
If you poke around the various phone forums, you'll occasionally find people asking this question, and in nearly every case, you'll find a know-it-all response that there is no point to adding RAW support to these phones. The JPEG engine is extracting every last bit of information, they'll say. All it would do is increase the processing requirements and lower performance. The sensors are too small, and the pixel counts too high.
None of this is any more true for today's phones than it was for the Canon G7.
Every time I take a photo with my Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the JPEG goes straight to my Google cloud storage. When I get home, the RAW file ought to be sitting there in my Lightroom library. We have the technology, and there's no doubting the usefulness. It's all long overdue.