Big company mentality, or how to screw up

[ludoo]

Samsung never ceases to amaze me: not only they continue to target and market their cameras to an imaginary social-medialite who lives on facebook, completely ignoring advanced amateurs and losing their battle with Sony which is doing the exact opposite with their NEX cameras; now -- if what people are discovering on DPReview is true -- they "fix" the RAW file issue not by adding compression as all the other manufacturers are doing, but by crippling the files.

Samsung is touting that their latest firmware for the NX200 has "reduced RAW file size (approximately up to 25% of the last version)", but it looks like they achieved that by dropping the information stored from 14bit to 12bit, as people have discovered in this DPReview thread.

This is what happens when managers who have the right CV and attended the right schools, but have no hands-on experience in a field get to make decisions. I call it the "universal manager syndrome", and have seen it happen countless times when I worked as a consultant. A pity, as Samsung has some great technology, they could be head to head with Sony in the mirrorless market instead of lagging way behind.

[poilu]

I don't think they want to cripple the files, they could save 12 bits from the begin if they wanted
they probably find that differences from 14bits to 12bits doesn't worth the 25% size difference
if someone can prove that pics are not the same good, ask Samsung to put 12/14 bits as an option

[ludoo]

Poilu, there are tests linked to on the Samsung thread that clearly show that with 12bit you lose some information in the underexposed areas, and that the difference is not subtle. The same thing has been reported by Korean users using the new firmware.