Digital BW, The Print

On Tuesday 26 April 2005 7:35 am, Peter Marshall wrote:
> Why Nikon did this is a very good question, but as the SDK provides the 
> answer to how to handle it, and there is nothing now to stop third-party 
> developers producing software that works with these files as well or 
> better than Nikon's own software.

The SDK is not a real solution.  It's "good enough" for many
people for now, which keeps people from worrying about the big
problems down the road.

For one thing, the SDK is only available to "bona fide developers",
whatever that means.  Innovators like the folks in this forum who
tinker with QTR probably don't qualify.  These folks have managed
to produce better prints from an Epson printer than Epson can.
It's quite likely that someone can do a better D2X raw conversion
than Nikon can.

Another problem is that the SDK only works on the operating
systems Nikon decides to support.  So it doesn't work on Linux,
for example.

And even on Windows, the SDK may drop support for the D2X in a
few years.  Then, if you want to keep using your D2X, you'll have
to also maintain a computer running the last supported version.
Imagine trying to maintain MSDOS on an old PC just so you can
run VisiCalc.