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Author Topic: This is why no RAW on the G7  (Read 87039 times)

32BT

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #40 on: December 05, 2006, 09:59:32 am »

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Canon CR2 RAW files losslessly compress to about 1/2 to 2/3 of uncompressed size, depending on ISO and subject. DNG does just a bit better than that.
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But given that the entire uncompressed data would be a little less than 15MB, you'd be looking at 8 to 10 MB p/s. Maybe they can pull it off, but the battery would be drained by the third picture... :-)
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jani

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #41 on: December 05, 2006, 11:47:52 am »

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But given that the entire uncompressed data would be a little less than 15MB, you'd be looking at 8 to 10 MB p/s. Maybe they can pull it off, but the battery would be drained by the third picture... :-)
The earlier G series cameras had the same battery as the 10D/20D/30D, the G7 has the same battery as the 400D.

Why should the battery drain quicker by writing similarly sized images on a G7 than on the 400D?
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32BT

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #42 on: December 05, 2006, 01:05:52 pm »

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The earlier G series cameras had the same battery as the 10D/20D/30D, the G7 has the same battery as the 400D.

Why should the battery drain quicker by writing similarly sized images on a G7 than on the 400D?
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Because there probably is no buffer. It would have to go straight to the card. Once you're in that territory, none of these babies do 1raw p/s...
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Jonathan Wienke

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #43 on: December 05, 2006, 04:38:38 pm »

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But given that the entire uncompressed data would be a little less than 15MB, you'd be looking at 8 to 10 MB p/s. Maybe they can pull it off, but the battery would be drained by the third picture... :-)

Or they could do what most cameras do, and have a buffer large enough to store a couple of uncompressed frames...
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jani

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #44 on: December 05, 2006, 05:16:44 pm »

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Because there probably is no buffer. It would have to go straight to the card. Once you're in that territory, none of these babies do 1raw p/s...
Writing to the card is something that would have to be done anyway, a buffer doesn't remove that consideration.

Adding a buffer means adding another power drain, not a power saver, unless there is additional logic that reduces the power drain by using smarter write algorithms to the card. I guesstimate that the savings of such algorithms would be minimal.

What the buffer may do, however, is to offer a time-limited higher shooting rate, until that buffer is full.
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BJL

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #45 on: December 05, 2006, 08:12:34 pm »

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Am I the only one who wants a pro-quality point and shoot ?
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No, though we may be few. There are cases where, even if I carry a DSLR with one lens attached, I would prefer to carry a high quality, compact, "telephoto dedicated" fixed camera instead of a telephoto lens for DSLR, let alone carrying a second DSLR body with telephoto lens attached.
Maybe about 25-100 f/2.8-3.5 in 1/1.8" or 2/3" format, roughly matching 100-400 in 35mm for FOV, so "following on" from a standard zoom.

No, I am not holding my breath.
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howiesmith

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #46 on: December 06, 2006, 07:33:12 am »

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Adding RAW support to the firmware functionality is a trivial programming exercise that at most would make a few cents' difference in the cost of the camera over its life cycle.
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I have no reason to either believe or not believe this.  Do you have any supporting sources for this?  Like, Canon?  How much does Canon think it will cost per camera?

There was a thread here about the cost/benefits of RAW.  Lots of posts on the benefits.  Only onaddressed what the user was willing to pay for RAW, but I didn't see anything about the actual costs.

I've been looking but I can't even find out how many G7s Canon is expecting to sell without RAW.  Seems like a very important piece of data for a per camera cost for RAW.
« Last Edit: December 06, 2006, 02:33:13 pm by howiesmith »
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Jonathan Wienke

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #47 on: December 06, 2006, 03:13:18 pm »

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There was a thread here about the cost/benefits of RAW.  Lots of posts on the benefits.  Only onaddressed what the user was willing to pay for RAW, but I didn't see anything about the actual costs.

Canon already had firmware code for RAW support; they had to take some time to remove that code from their code base going from the G6 to the G7. Unless there is an entirely new chipset in the G7 which has zero compatibility with that of the G6 and required a complete rewrite of the firmware from scratch, it probably cost Canon more to remove RAW support than it would have to leave it in. At any rate the cost for RAW support would be negligible per-camera; we're talking mabe a week's worth of work for one to three mid-level programmers, depending on how much tweaking the G6 RAW code would need to function in the G7. But it could also be just a few man-hours (mostly for testing) if no major changes were needed for the G6-G7 update. I've been programming for nearly 10 years, and am pretty confident about the timeline here.

From the user's perspective, the costs of RAW would larger image files, meaning greater storage requirements, and moderately greater demands on the computer processing the images (doing the RAW conversion). Once the RAW is converted, there's no difference in file size or CPU demands over JPEG. RAW also slows the camera down when shooting; the larger file sizes fill the buffer faster and increase file write times.
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howiesmith

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #48 on: December 06, 2006, 03:40:12 pm »

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... it probably cost Canon more to remove RAW support than it would have to leave it in. At any rate the cost for RAW support would be negligible per-camera; we're talking mabe [sic] a week's worth of work for one to three mid-level programmers, depending on how much tweaking the G6 RAW code would need to function in the G7.

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"Probably cost ..."  "Maybe ..." a week.  "Depending on ..."  Do you have any facts to back this up besides your your personal thoughts, ideas and/or maybe not so relavent experiences.  I am not saying you are wrong, just not at all convincing.

"negligible per-camera ..."  How many G7s is Canon planning on making?
« Last Edit: December 06, 2006, 03:42:39 pm by howiesmith »
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Jonathan Wienke

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #49 on: December 06, 2006, 04:58:18 pm »

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"Probably cost ..."  "Maybe ..." a week.  "Depending on ..."  Do you have any facts to back this up besides your your personal thoughts, ideas and/or maybe not so relavent experiences.  I am not saying you are wrong, just not at all convincing.

"negligible per-camera ..."  How many G7s is Canon planning on making?

I spent over 7 years as a professional programmer, so I have a fairly good idea of what kind of project writing RAW support would be. Assuming Canon's programming department is at all competent, they would have code libraries of firmware for all of their existing cameras that could be borrowed from for established features like RAW support. If the programming was done competently in the first place and the chipsets weren't too different between the G6 and G7, adding RAW support to the G7 could be as simple as pasting the G6 code into the G7 firmware, doing a search/replace to change "G6" to "G7", changing the parameters for the height and width of the RAW image, and adding a menu entry for RAW mode in the file format menu option list. The 3 programmers working 1 week would be a worst-case scenario if RAW support had to be written from scratch for the G7. But we're still talking less than $10,000 US, and if Canon sold 10,000 G7 cameras worldwide (and I bet they will sell many more than that), RAW support would be < $1/camera. Would you pay an extra $1 for RAW on your camera?
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howiesmith

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #50 on: December 06, 2006, 05:13:39 pm »

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I spent ... so I have a fairly good idea ... . Assuming ... . If ... , adding RAW support to the G7 could be as simple as ... .  But we're still talking less than $10,000 US, and if Canon sold ... . Would you pay an extra $1 for RAW on your camera?
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No facts that I see.  Just more opinions and conjecture.  I would be more convinced with some cold hard facts to support your beliefs.

Would I pay a $1 for RAW?  Yes, if I were buying a digital camera.  Bit then I am not the main stream camera consumer either.

When I was in school, I came up with what I thought was a great idea that would only cost General Motors a penny or so a car.  Bad idea.  It would have cost them millions of dollars.
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Ray

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #51 on: December 07, 2006, 07:46:21 am »

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No facts that I see.  Just more opinions and conjecture.  I would be more convinced with some cold hard facts to support your beliefs.
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This entire thread is lacking in facts. It starts off with a report of a very reasonable comment from Chuck Westfall, ie. that you can't expect much RAW latitude from a pixel that is less than 2 microns in diameter, then progresses along the lines that RAW is always an advantage and that poor Chuck doesn't know what he's talking about.

Engaging in some conjecture myself, I would guess that when Chuck made that statement (assuming he did and/or was not misquoted) he probably did not have in mind the capabilities of experienced ACR and C1 users who are often prepared to spend hours processing an image to achieve some sort of fine art vision.

P&S cameras are not designed for fastidious perfectionists who will go to any lengths to extract the last 10th of a stop of dynamic range. The issue is not whether Chuck is literally right in asserting that there would be nothing to be gained by including a RAW mode in the G7, but whether or not the benefits would be sufficiently great to interest anyone.

If the cost of including RAW support really is trivial, one might wonder why Canon did not include it despite technical advice that it would not serve much purpose. A gullible public is often impressed with 'professional sounding' features, so perhaps the Canon marketing team should be congratulated for not adding bells and whistles to the G7 in order to gain a few more sales.

What I think is happening in this thread is, you have a bunch of photographers who are well aware of the significant benefits of shooting RAW with DSLRs and who are making the erroneous assumption that the same degree of improvement of image quality is applicable to a P&S RAW image. If this assumption is not erroneous, then show me the evidence. Someone could perhaps start off with RAW versus jpeg samples from the G6. We could then discount any improvements with the G6, by a certain percentage, and get some idea of what we could have expected from a G7 with RAW mode.

It seems clear to me that a small sensor with 2 micron photosites would produce unacceptable noise at all ISOs, including base ISO, in RAW mode, except with well-lit and very low dynamic range scenes. Is it reasonable to expect any manufacturer to offer a feature on their shiny new product that facilitates the production of crap images, just for the benefit of a few individuals like Jonathan Wienke and John Sheehy who might be able to do a better processing job than the in-camera algorithms?

I think there's a reasonable assumption being made by Canon that perfectionists and fine-art photographers do not use P&S cameras for that purpose of making fine art photos. The sensors and pixels are simply too small and the dynamic range is just dreadful. If you think I'm exaggerating, it's probably because all your jpeg images from your P&S camera (if you happen to own one, as I do) have had noise reduction already applied in-camera.

My very compact and feature-rich Sony T30 has a few manual features like exposure bracketing and EV adjustments from + to - 2EV, as well as a live histogram. There should be no excuse for blown highlights, apart from complete incompetence. I just recently did a careful comparison of 2 shots of the same scene that differed by one stop exposure. The shot with the greater exposure had irretrievably blown highlights. The shot with half the exposure was just right with respect to the highlights. After levels and curves adjustments in PS to get both images looking similar with respect to over all balance, I pixel-peeped the shadows, expecting to see more noise in the image with one stop less exposure.

Surprise! Surprise! There wasn't. However, what I did notice was a loss of resolution in the image with less exposure, despite the fact that the shutter speed was twice as fast. Grass and foliage appeared slightly smudged (or shall we say, more smudged). Clearly the camera had applied more aggressive noise reduction to the image with less exposure.

As far as I know, there are no noise reduction programs that do not also to some degree blur fine detail. Even the luminance smoothing control in ACR blurs fine detail. One can choose not to apply noise reduction to certain parts of the image, or apply less of it to certain parts of the image, and I concede there might be an advantage there, starting with a noisy RAW image. But I doubt the time and effort would be justified by the results.

Show me some G6 comparisons if you want to argue.
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bjanes

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #52 on: December 07, 2006, 10:46:57 am »

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This entire thread is lacking in facts. It starts off with a report of a very reasonable comment from Chuck Westfall, ie. that you can't expect much RAW latitude from a pixel that is less than 2 microns in diameter, then progresses along the lines that RAW is always an advantage and that poor Chuck doesn't know what he's talking about.

Engaging in some conjecture myself, I would guess that when Chuck made that statement (assuming he did and/or was not misquoted) he probably did not have in mind the capabilities of experienced ACR and C1 users who are often prepared to spend hours processing an image to achieve some sort of fine art vision.

Show me some G6 comparisons if you want to argue.
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I have to agree with Ray's analysis. We don't really now Canon's reasons for not including RAW with the new camera, but the decision was most likely made in Japan and Chuck Westfall has to put forth the best explanation he can.

One suggestion was that Canon wanted to have a closed system where they had control, but then JEPG output is completely open and requires no special software for access to the images. What it does give Canon is control over the processing of the images and I think it boils down to arrogance on the part of Canon. They know best, and the customer preferences do not matter. This attitude is not unique to Canon
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Jonathan Wienke

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #53 on: December 07, 2006, 11:09:46 am »

Ray, you have it backwards. Canon is saying that their firmware RAW conversion is better than ACR, Capture One, and any other RAW converter, and their in-camera noise reduction is better than Neat Image, Noise Ninja, and all of the other noise reduction tools out there, or if not better, then at least close enough that it's not worth your bother to try, and by the way, we're not even going to let you do that. That's pretty bold and arrogant on Canon's part, and Canon has not offered one shred of proof to bolster their claims. If you want to claim you've seen Elvis on the mother ship, fine, but you'd better have high-definition video of the King singing "Jailhouse Rock" if you want anyone to take you seriously. I've spent the last several years learning the differences between what one can get out of RAWS vs. JPEGs, especially in difficult circumstances like concerts, and I see no reason to waste my time debunking Canon's "I saw Elvis! Really!" marketing technobullcrap when Canon hasn't seen fit to offer any RAW/JPEG image pairs of difficult subject matter (like a concert or some other low-light, high-contrast subject) to try to prove their point. If they did so, I have $100 that says they would be embarassed.
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BernardLanguillier

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #54 on: December 07, 2006, 11:13:14 am »

Jonathan,

Canon is only saying that they know better than 90% of their customers for the G7. IMHO, their are right.

Cheers, Bernard

Eric Myrvaagnes

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #55 on: December 07, 2006, 12:10:10 pm »

I suspect that all the posters on this thread have done more thinking about the pros and cons of RAW than the nice folks at Canon have. After all, they are the people that determined that owners of the 5D would have greater need for a "Print-from-camera button" than for, say, a mirror-lockup button.

When my S60 dies, I will certainly look for a decent P&S-with-RAW, if I can find one, but if there aren't any, I may (grudgingly) consider the G7 or its successor.
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Ken Tanaka

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #56 on: December 07, 2006, 12:28:32 pm »

My purely speculative supposition is that removal of RAW on Canon's p&s cameras was, indeed, a move to protect the low-end dslr models.   I have no data to buttress this idea other than the relative prices of the Canon camera models on both sides of this range.  Remember, Canon heritage is principally that of an optical company.  They basically wrap electronics around lenses.  That is, they want to sell lenses.  

But while y'all are working this matter out I think I'll just keep shooting with my little G7.
« Last Edit: December 07, 2006, 12:29:04 pm by Ken Tanaka »
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bjanes

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #57 on: December 07, 2006, 12:39:56 pm »

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My purely speculative supposition is that removal of RAW on Canon's p&s cameras was, indeed, a move to protect the low-end dslr models.   I have no data to buttress this idea other than the relative prices of the Canon camera models on both sides of this range.  Remember, Canon heritage is principally that of an optical company.  They basically wrap electronics around lenses.  That is, they want to sell lenses. 

But while y'all are working this matter out I think I'll just keep shooting with my little G7.
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Ken,

That is a good idea-- it does protect their low end DSLRs from completion from Canon P&S, but as long as alternatives are available from Nikon, Sony, Olympus, etc, a discerning user has alternatives to the Canon P&S. Even though you might use Canon SLRs and lenses, there is really no advantage to going with Canon for your advanced P&S. Of course, in another thread it was noted that Sony discontinued their large sensor P&S once they introduced a SLR. Apparently, there are no alternatives there.
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howiesmith

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #58 on: December 07, 2006, 01:09:33 pm »

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Jonathan,

Canon is only saying that they know better than 90% of their customers for the G7. IMHO, their are right.

Cheers, Bernard
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I agree with that conclusion.  Sure don't know the percents, but I would guess Canon knows better than more than 90%.  The G7 is not directed at the same market as the DSLR.  The problem seems to be users of DSLR thinking they are (or at least should be) the market audience.  

For every photographer that thinks he needs RAW, I know 10 that don't even know what RAW is and wouldn't use it if it were available.

The idea of competing with other Canon products seems plausible (high end p&s vs. low end DSLR).  Such competion simply isn't good business.  Maybe Canon does know what they are doing and their own business after all.
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Robert Roaldi

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This is why no RAW on the G7
« Reply #59 on: December 07, 2006, 03:42:45 pm »

I wrote software for 25 years, 10-12 of those writing firmware. On the limited aspect of this discussion regarding the amount of work to implement RAW support in firmware, Jonathan's arguments are perfectly reasonable, with the proviso (that he stated) that the chipset in the G7 is the same (or even really similar to, IMO) that of the G6. That is, if the chipset is the same/similar, the manpower resources to implement RAW support would have been trivial compared with the larger product project. The additional requirements because of the greater number of pixels are also minor in terms of moving bytes around. Three more million pixels is not significant in computer terms.

If the chipsets are similar, it's not the development costs of implementing RAW support that were likely the determining factor in eliminating the feature. There could be lots of other reasons why; only Canon knows. I have been on many projects where the technical reasons for doing or not doing something were among the least important considerations.

If the chipsets were different, unlikely but possible, then in my experience, the addtional costs of implementing RAW would still not be that great an extra effort, given what the development team would already be doing. Inside the camera, after all, at some point, there is RAW data in some form that some piece of software is converting to a JPG before it is written to a memory card.
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