A genuinely cool Windows Vista feature
– At least for digital photography enthusiasts anyway! I stumbled across this on the web today. Vista supports a multimedia-style codec system for digital camera RAW files. That is, if your camera’s manufacturer makes a codec available, Vista can handle their proprietary RAW files like any old JPEG, and can provide an API for third party applications to work with them too. Cool.
It just so happens that Nikon have released their RAW (NEF, in Nikon parlance) codec for Vista, and you can get it here.
Windows XP users, for the moment you’re shit out of luck.
I installed my copy of Vista Home Premium on Friday, so I’m going to give this a go when I get home. I have, until now, been shooting everything in JPEG ‘FINE’ on the camera. I have a 2GB SD card so have plenty of space to shoot RAW. People have gotten some very impressive results processing RAW images as opposed to JPEGs. If I switch to RAW full-time I can see myself archiving loads of stuff off to DVD periodically to keep some disk space free!
John on February 28th, 2007
I hardly call it “Cool”
Steve on February 28th, 2007
In the context of operating systems, its pretty damn cool!
John on February 28th, 2007
He he…. hmmmmmm Is it though, really
John Butler on February 28th, 2007
Ah I find Vista to be really slow for all that kind of stuff. Give me Irfan View any day
Steve on March 1st, 2007
IrfanView was my weapon of choice on Windows XP