CrunchGear

Interesting. I’ve always wondered when a lossless compression scheme for RAW shots would become popular — there’s already Rawzor, but it’s not the same idea. This XDepth Raw format is encoded in such a way that any viewer capable of processing jpegs can view this format, although it allows for all the conservation of data and depth that RAW, DNG, and CRW among others provide. It claims to reduce the file to about 200kb/megapixel, which is pretty amazing if it works.

When a regular viewer opens it, it acts as a JPEG, but when an app that has XDepth capability opens it, it works as a RAW file. I’m afraid that this may lead to changes to the file itself in JPEG mode incompatible with RAW, although RAW changes would be saved as metadata and as such wouldn’t affect JPEG processing. I’m sure they’ve already thought of that, though, and this post is getting a little nitpicky so I’m just going to end it. Right… now.