A RAW repository, The Internet Archive and OpenRAW

Stan writes "I just read this in the OpenRAW mailing list, OpenRAW plans to create a RAW repository, a final resting place for RAW file documentations of current and already abandoned digital cameras. The RAW repository will be hosted in the Internet Archive, which describes themselves as a digital archive of the Internet and other cultural artifacts. And they have all reasons to support OpenRAW, they currently photograph billions of book pages with cameras and store them in RAW format. Unfortunately the camera makers think different (which is not always a good thing)."

Comments

So does basically every camera

[Jonathan]

The point isn't that you can get a jpg out of your camera -- I haven't seen a digital camera that can't -- the problem is that the original, uncompressed data generally isn't in an open format.

Re:why?

[petermgreen]

in this case (cameras) raw reffers to the fact its the raw unprocessed data from the CCD

this has to be processed to convert it to a form that we would recognise as an image file. This can happen either on the camera or on a PC.

However This conversion process may well not be fully reversable (due to rounding errors) and bloats the data considerablly (CCDs generally make a red green OR blue value at each location image files generally have red green AND blue at each location so turning CCD output into an image file always involves interpolation) so from an archivists point of view its best to keep the raw data unfortunately that raw data is often in a closed format.