Slightly off topic posting today, but I work with several camera aficionado’s so this news story came to my attention this morning. Microsoft have released a Microsoft Camera Codec Pack for Windows 7 and Windows Vista which allows direct handling of raw files within Windows. Previously this required third part programs from the camera makers as each of them has a slightly different, largely undocumented, raw format.
For those not in the know, raw is an image format of uncompressed, minimally processed, data from the image sensor of a digital camera (raw is popular with DSLR cameras). The file is of a higher quality with more image information and allows for finer control than other image formats such as JPEG.
See the Inside Windows Live blog for full details of the codec pack or go straight to the download.