Camera RAW is just a Marketing Ploy

I am one of those amateur photographers who was always impressed with how the pros would start with RAW images and bring out the absolute best from their originals.  When the Canon EOS Rebel T2i was announced the fact that you could record RAW & jpg at the same time seemed like a really valuable feature.

The reality seems to be something different.  I have had my Canon T2i for about a week now.  I set it to record the largest possible images (18 megapixel) plus RAW.  On a sixteen gigabyte memory chip the camera said I had room for about 415 images.

I went around taking pictures and everything seemed fine.  Then I tried to load the pictures into Picasa via an SDHC Class 6 memory card reader.  The pictures loaded, but all the Camera RAW images were weird, distorted and had a violet/pink cast.

So I think "Maybe the free Picasa program can't  handle the RAW files properly.  I should try the expensive ($200) Lightroom2 program from Adobe.  It will no doubt do better."  Wrong! Lightroom2 churned around for a while and then told me there were 72 files that had problems and it had skipped them.  Those were all the Camera RAW files of course.  Unfortunately, it didn't even see the 72 associated jpg's!

I hopped out onto the web and did some Google searches.  I'm not the first person to ask the question of what is going on and here is what I found.  The camera manufacturers change the codec every time they manufacturer a new camera.  You can think of the codec as a map to the image data on the memory chip before the camera software processes it.  Until they publish a specification or someone reverse engineers the data structure none of the current software will be able to read the camera RAW files properly.

What really surprised me, and prompted this post, is that apparently no one really cares about this and the lag between time first sales of a new camera and availability of  software with an updated codec is likely to be three to six MONTHS!  To me that screams "NO ONE CARES!"  If a lot of people used camera RAW files there would be actual demand for it and the new codec would be available immediately.

I am left with the feeling that many semi professional and professional photographers think camera RAW is important, but few of them actually need to use it immediately after a new camera comes out.  The reality is so few people are interested in actually using camera RAW publication of a new codec is very much a back burner issue.