Keith Wong
New member
This is not a criticism of RAW converters, I am just curious as to the answer. All RAW converters on the market that I have tried are like this, so i'm not singling out any particular one.
The cheapest sub-$1000 DSLR on the market can capture an image, apply white balance and noise reduction, apply a colour curve, sharpen, and then convert to JPG and save to a slow CF card. And it can do this 3 times per second.
My $4000 desktop PC, which has an AMD x64 4800+, 4 GB of RAM, and twin 10,000rpm HDD's in RAID0 configuration, takes the same RAW file and takes 10+ seconds to do the same conversion. I am using Bibble Pro with the latest updates. Just look - the RAM in my computer alone is bigger than my CF card, and the 10,000rpm HDD's will blow the fastest CF cards out of the water by several orders of magnitude.
If I were to do no image adjustments and just let the RAW converter process the image using camera settings, the two files (in-camera JPEG and RAW converter JPEG) are virtually indistinguishable.
I suppose the answer is in the specialized imaging chip on the camera, and the additional overhead of running a bloated OS like Windows XP. But I would have thought that with such an overwhelming computing advantage, my computer should be just as quick if not quicker.
Anybody well-versed with computers and RAW converters like to give an answer?
The cheapest sub-$1000 DSLR on the market can capture an image, apply white balance and noise reduction, apply a colour curve, sharpen, and then convert to JPG and save to a slow CF card. And it can do this 3 times per second.
My $4000 desktop PC, which has an AMD x64 4800+, 4 GB of RAM, and twin 10,000rpm HDD's in RAID0 configuration, takes the same RAW file and takes 10+ seconds to do the same conversion. I am using Bibble Pro with the latest updates. Just look - the RAM in my computer alone is bigger than my CF card, and the 10,000rpm HDD's will blow the fastest CF cards out of the water by several orders of magnitude.
If I were to do no image adjustments and just let the RAW converter process the image using camera settings, the two files (in-camera JPEG and RAW converter JPEG) are virtually indistinguishable.
I suppose the answer is in the specialized imaging chip on the camera, and the additional overhead of running a bloated OS like Windows XP. But I would have thought that with such an overwhelming computing advantage, my computer should be just as quick if not quicker.
Anybody well-versed with computers and RAW converters like to give an answer?