[plug] Digital SLRs

[Daniel Pittman]

Richard Meyer <meyerri at westnet.com.au> writes:

> I've got too much money and am itching to spend it on a DSLR - I'm looking
> at an Olympus E-450 - mainly because the camera itself has the vibration
> reduction technology, so extra lenses are cheaper than the Nikon/Canons that
> have anti-shake built into the lens.

You didn't ask, however: I imagine you know with http://www.dpreview.com/

> Now - I haven't done much searching, but I'd like to get it all from the
> horse's mouth - how well does Linux handle RAW images?

Pretty solid; the core application code is discussed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dcraw

Poke around that and you should get a solid idea.  The summary is, though,
that the transformation is as good as, or better than, many of the vendor
tools, that it actually updates to use newer decoding[1], and updates
regularly to support new hardware.

> Are they easy to convert later?

Generally.  Digikam, in KDE, does well with them; I understand the GNOME tools
are fairly decent too.

> Any caveats?

Expect managed colour to be hard, because Linux still has poor support for
it.  This doesn't matter too much if you only plan on working to the web, or
on an amateur basis, however.

        Daniel

Footnotes: 
[1]  So, you actually *do* get the proposed "better quality over time"
     improvements that RAW theoretically offered.

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✣ Daniel Pittman            ✉ daniel at rimspace.net            ☎ +61 401 155 707
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