On Thursday, August 25, 2005, at 07:54 AM, Sylwester Pietrzyk wrote:
There were a lot of factors that combined to make the Contax digital a
flop: Abysmal battery life and horrible autofocus seemed to be the
main
operational problems. Apparently, the Contax-supplied RAW conversion
software was so bad as to make RAW shots unusable(!) and no one else
ever made RAW conversion software for it so you were stuck shooting
JPEG
or TIFF. Furthermore, the camera could not show image reviews of RAW
shots on its own LCD! 6 megapixels was starting to look pretty mundane
(to put it mildly) by the camera hit the market. Combine all this with
an expensive camera and a very expensive and very small lens line-up
and
you have a recipe for disaster.
I saw a review of N1 in German "Foto magazin". Noise levels above
iso400
were barely useable, and that was clearly another reason for N1
failure...
Actually, the highest usable ISO setting is 160. Above that noise is
incredible. Also, any exposure longer than one second is killed by
very high noise levels.
At the time the Contax ND was introduced Pentax also showed a pro
digital camera that would have used the same Philips (now Dalsa) chip.
Pentax wisely decided to kill the project when the price per chip was
raised by Philips. Kyocera should have done the same, but made the
decision to go forward. I've talked to people at Kyocera who were
involved in the project and they say the software problems were caused
by lack of involvement and support by Philips.
I believe the latest versions of Photoshop have support for the Contax
RAW files, but could be remembering wrong. The Contax ND has a very
small but dedicated group of users.
Bob
