Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Problems With Digital Camers On Vista

I noticed back in March that Microsoft issued a knowledge base article about Windows Vista corrupting RAW files from digital cameras. Well Canon has also just issued a service notice about possible data loss when using Windows Vista. "...We have discovered that the original image data of TIFF (RAW) images shot with an EOS-1D or EOS-1Ds Digital SLR Camera, and rotated or edited using Windows Explorer or Windows Gallery on a computer running Windows Vista, will disappear from the computer's memory...". There are also problems with Nikon when using vista. I'm sure all RAW plug-ins to Vista will suffer similar data loss or corruption. I think all photographers should stay away from Vista.

Update: Added info on Nikon digital cameras.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

I second your recommendation.

Fernando Madruga said...

Well, I'm no professional photographer, but I'm a developer and other than installing Vista sometime on a Virtual Machine for testing only, I have no plans on making the switch to Vista: seems too much eye-candy with too little *real* content... Being constantly nagged by UAC does seem a major PITA...
Of course, some domestic users that mostly browse the internet and play some games may find it fun, but I'll stick to XP for as long as I can.

Chris Bensen said...

Users will either turn UAC off (most people I know have), or just blindly click it without understanding what program is asking for the elevated status.

Fernando Madruga said...

Precisely! Anything so intrusive is bound to one of those two approaches after the initial "read what it says before clicking" phase!

I used a firewall that was that intrusive, even "making up" problems, e.g., if I switched from Outlook to Firefox (both already running), then navigated somewhere in Firefox, this firewall would complain that "Outlook may be controlling Firefox to access some site"! Even though I could create a rule for ignoring that, it would happen on any other program change, so I quickly got fed up of clicking to "Ignore all" and simply uninstalled the firewall!

UAC is one of the main selling points of Vista that will soon be quite useless as people do either of the things you suggested!

Of course, for MSFT, it will be the user's fault for either not reading before clicking or disabling it, so they will have taken a "major step" in improving security, only that the users will not be behaving! :)

Next MS OS will come with compulsory and automatic UAC that you can not disable nor control: it will check MSFT's servers to determine wether you're allowed to do it or not! :)

Shawn Oster said...

Completely off topic and late into the conversation but regarding the comment "Users will either turn UAC off (most people I know have)...".

While that may be true I've come across several applications where the developer obviously turned off UAC and so never saw all the issues their installer or application generated. So from a developer perspective go ahead and turn off UAC but please, test your software on a system with it turned on.

I've also come across developers with the whole "Well I'm not going to upgrade to Vista" which in turn means their applications perform sub-par on Vista, which is highly annoying for the end-users that do switch. End-users shouldn't have to suffer because of a developer's personal bias.

That being said some things I love about Vista, other things annoy the living hell out of me. In other words it's just like when I switched from 98 to XP so many years ago.

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