| attila77 |
2010-07-26 23:10 |
Re: Nokia has exciting news for N900 users
Quote:
Originally Posted by danramos
(Post 765349)
JPEG doesn't "bake those in" any more than TIFF, DNG or RAW. Once you have the image and you begin to process the image, ALL the data is just as malleable and useful as anything RAW gives you. Hell, JPEG even borrows a page out of TIFF and records a lot of that in the EXIF metadata. RAW isn't a format. It's just a proprietary aperture dump. Putting it into a 100% quality JPEG with EXIF metadata would record most of the same information (ALL of the info, if you use the MakerNote tag in the EXIF metadata) with pretty decent quality and it would at least work everywhere.
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Err... No, not even close. As you say, JPEG is an image containing 8bit RGB pixels, with all of the camera's postprocessing functions applied. RAW is a heap of data read from the sensor. The EXIF doesn't help you as you cannot (without deteriorating it) un-sharpen the image, un-apply the noise reduction, change color space/WB, change the demosaicing algorithm, etc. Not sure about the N900's sensor, but P&S/DSLRs even have a different sensor bit depth (10, 12 or even 14 bit pixels) which is also lost on conversion to JPEG. And the fact these are on a phone matters actually quite a bit, since usually you can't actually SET any of these parameters, and the default settings are all too eager to oversaturate, oversharpen and over-noise-reduce in order to please average Joe. And of course those algos have no super-fancy hardware like the DIGIC or EXPEED ASICs so there is always a balance between quality and speed (I'm not making this up - on one of the Summit talks a Nokian actually said that they managed to get far better pictures quality-wise, but then the processing time would be 10-20-30 seconds per picture and they opted for the quicker one). |
