Olympus Shadow Adjustment Technology
Posted on: Wed, 06/04/2008 - 11:15am
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Olympus Shadow Adjustment Technology
It seems Olympus has jumped into the Apical arena by implementing their version of DRO. Similar to basic DRO or Nikon's D-Lighting, Olympus is on the map now showing their implementation of Apicals technology into the Olympus E-420. Both licensed this technology from Apical a bit ago, and now we are seeing it in the DSLR lineup from Olympus, while Nikon has had D-Lighting for some time now.
Either is near Sony's Advanced DRO+ in the Sony A700, but it looks as though both companies have committed to this technology to a degree.
I don't think going halfway is the answer, Advanced DRO+ is the only direction to go in my opinion, so it doesn't seem to pose any real threat as long as Sony can continue to advance its technology in this department (and they should, I expect to see a more advanced version of DRO in the flagship).
-Carl
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-AlphaMountWorld Chef-
"You can't legislate morality or common sense."
for whatever reason.
It looks like Sony and Olympus are just using a combination of the Apical's iridix engine plus their own tweaks. Apical shows the iridix C library being available in two versions standard for up to 8 bit and high for > 8 bit. They don't list on the main site, if there are additional capabilities/api calls for the latter.
To me it doesn't seem likely that Sony's A700 implementation could be so head and shoulders above the rest without there being some licensing(?) money involved to get that ability. Either that or perhaps Sony is able to take advantage of it at much more advantageous point in their processing pipeline than others. Sony's A700 implementation to me looks very similar to the demos on the site, but not so for a200, a300 versions and not so for the Olympus version.
I wonder if the A200, A300 etc would not have such drastically toned down versions of DRO were again there not some licensing money involved for them to provide a more powerful version. I don't think they'd want to provide A700 level because that might hurt A700 sales though.
I wish they'd give developers the ability to tap into some of the api calls and introduce uploadable plugins, customizable UI or some such :-D.
Eric
-AlphaMountWorld Chef