OpenRAW

Two reasons.

3. Open standards are vital in any field.

Imagine if you had to but a printing application from Epson to print pictures to your Epson printer. Or if you could only buy Palm applications from Palm. Or could only read email if you had the same email reader as the sender (remember the early days of email, when all the vendors had their own formats? chaos!).

Time and time again, open standards have led to usage and technological advances.

2. I don't want to pay extra for access to my pictures.

When I buy a PDA, I don't pay extra for the software; when I buy a printer, I don't pay extra for the drivers.

But when I bought my Nikon D100 (at $1600 + lens), I couldn't use my preferred image processing apps on the files, and Nikon wanted another $100 for software to do anything useful with the RAW images. That's absurd.

Anyway, it led me to decide not to shoot in RAW.

Now, almost three years later, my preferred image processing apps have gotten support for Nikon's RAW format, and I am contemplating switching to RAW. But my entire workflow is based on non-RAW images, so I need to work out a new one.

If Nikon's RAW format had been open, and therefore easy for my apps to support, I'd have been shooting RAW all along. But the closed format (a) let Nikon get away with charging me extra for the software, and (b) made it hard for my apps to support RAW.

And now I hear that Nikon might be *encrypting* their RAW files? That's utterly ridiculuous - they're *my* pictures, give me access to them!

Besides, is the processing software really a money-maker for these companies? The camera companies are in the *camera* business, not the *software* business - concentrate on making better cameras, open your file formats, and let the software experts write the software.