Adobe Support for Canon 40D Will Not Be Delayed
September 11, 2007: A listener recently left a comment on this page that he was concerned about rumors on the internets (those darn tubes!) that, because of some tiff with Canon, Adobe would be delaying it’s support of the Canon 40D.
It’s funny - feuds between companies are pretty rare (NBC and Apple not included) but everyone always imagines that they catfight like contestants on Big Brother. I didn’t believe the story when I heard it, so I called Tom Hogarty, the Lightroom, Camera Raw and DNG Product Manager over at Adobe.
Tom’s a very friendly and straightforward guy, and he immediately dispelled the notion that there would be some arbitrary or intentional delay in providing support for the 40D in any of those products.
Here’s what he wrote me in an email on this subject:
“When a new camera is released we always try to provide support for that camera’s native raw file format as quickly as possible. But our decision not to comment publicly on future release timing does lend itself to an environment that encourages speculation and rumors. Rest assured that there are no hidden agendas in our efforts to support new cameras and I look forward to providing the update that includes Canon EOS 40D support. “
As a 40D owner myself, this puts me at ease. I can’t wait to be able to play with my 40D raw images in Lightroom as soon as possible, and I have the feeling I won’t have to wait very long.
Scott
September 12th, 2007 at 11:28 am
Scott, thanks for taking the trouble to follow up on this. I’m imagine the Powers That Be realize that you speak for many others and that you have a big platform among the digerati so I’m sure it will help. However, I think you misunderstood me–or I wasn’t clear. I didn’t mean to imply that I thought that either Canon or Adobe were dragging their heels intentionally in this matter or had some kind of feud going on. Rather, I was surprised that it seems to be business at usual that Canon doesn’t give Adobe ANY advance information (and especially any kind of technical heads up) before they release a new camera. My impression from reading the Adobe Lightroom forum (and the folks over there seemed to be on a first name basis with the Adobe Camera Raw/Lightroom teams for what that’s worth) is that Adobe has to stand in line with everyone else to get their hands on a 40D. It just seems like a crazy policy on Canons part. I can’t see any rationale for it. If anything it would discourage buyers from purchasing a new camera upon release and I don’t imagine people are going to abandon Adobe for Canon’s Raw Processing programs. As far as Adobe goes, I also got the impression that they didn’t go out of their way to prepare themselves to act quickly when they eventually DID get a camera to work with. It seems to me that they should have some obligation to their customers to try and accelerate the process somewhat in the case of a major release like the 40D. My impression is that they intend to stick with their standard upgrade/fix schedule (which I came to understand was 3 or 4 times a year) regardless of circumstances or demand. In fact reading some of the postings on the Lightroom thread there seemed to be very little sympathy (from the posters who seemed to be kind of “inside” as I mentioned) for 40D owners. There were a couple instances of “well I had to wait a long time until Camera Raw accepted my 30D so why shouldn’t you? weird I hope you are right that the wait will be a short one, but I’m not so confident. You are such an optimist, you must listen to “The Better World” podcast.
September 12th, 2007 at 11:38 am
I apologize for being so tenacious (and wordy) about this, but there is one other thing I forgot to mention. I can understand that it’s a major deal to create an update for Lightroom and it’s unreasonable to expect it in this instance. However, I would think that it wouldn’t be nearly as hard to add the 40D (and maybe some other recently released cameras that are unsupported) to the Adobe DNG converter. All I want to do is get the images into Lightroom–DNG is fine with me!
September 14th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
YAAAYYYYY
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2007/09/camera_raw_42_lr_12.html
Of course I feel stupid that I made such a fuss, but I wish they could have been a little more specific about the release…