OpenRAW

In June 2006, the OpenRAW team sent out printed hardcopies of the 2006 RAW Survey report to the top management of Canon, Nikon and Sony in Japan and a few days ago we received a "thank you" letter from Sony.

The translation follows:

The letter and the survey report that was sent to our chairman was read
throughly. Our chairman has instructed me to send an answer to you, so
please kindly excuse that I am writing on his behalf.

We have carefully read your "2006 Raw Survey results," which describes the
opinions and preferences of consumers. Thank you very much. We have also
visited the OpenRAW web site using the information you provided. The web
site also displays a great many views and preferences from people in fields
related to photography. We admire your effort to gather so much valuable
information and for making it available on the World Wide Web.

Some of the information is useful for planning and designing new products.
We believe using this information will enable us to create products that
will meet our customers' desires. We have already instructed our production
section to refer to these data. We will make every effort to meet customers'
desires to become their preferred company. We are grateful to you for
sending us such valuable information.

Thank you very much. Please pardon the delay in writing to you.

Thank you for favoring us, and we wish business success and good health for
Mr. Juergen Specht and Mr. Calvin Jones.

Yasuo Takagi

Finally the 2006 RAW Survey Report is available as PDF file. Download it from here:

http://openraw.org/files/2006rawsurveyreport.pdf.

The report requires Adobe Reader version 5.0 or later.

On January 31, 2006, the Open RAW initiative launched an international survey on this Web site to collect information about the experiences, requirements, preferences, and concerns of digital photographers and other interested parties regarding RAW imaging technology and now we published the results in 5 chapters.

More than two-thirds of the 19,207 participants expressed concern that they won't be able to open or edit raw files created by older digital cameras. The most telling statistic is the 90% of respondents who agreed: 'Once a digital image is written to a file by a camera, data in all parts of the image file should belong to the photographer who captured the image. Camera makers should publish full and open descriptions of all parts of the raw image files their camera produce.'

The full reports are available at:

http://www.openraw.org/2006rawsurvey/

and the individual chapters are here:

• Chapter 1: Who responded to the 2006 RAW Survey?
• Chapter 2: Perceptions of the Advantages and Disadvantages of RAW Imaging Technology
• Chapter 3: Preferences about RAW Image File Conversion and Editing Software
• Chapter 4: Experiences, Beliefs, and Preferences Concerning RAW Imaging Technology
• Chapter 5: Preferences among Camera Features in a Hypothetical Camera Purchase Decision

To discuss these results, please register a new account or request your password, if you posted on this site before.

Thanks!

OpenRAW Team