For those of us who shoot digital SLR photography and love Windows Vista, this is a great day. The Nikon NEF codec will allow us to leverage the great Photo Gallery features of Vista, even with our non-jpeg files.

Shooting RAW vs. shooting JPEG is an ongoing debate between many amateur photographers, but when I am shooting something that I hope to frame, may need to edit, want the utmost in dynamic range, and can't risk compression artifacts of any kind, I switch my D70 to RAW. The problem has always been that when I just want to index, view and share these pictures along with my 10,000+ JPEG images in windows, I need to do one of two things:

  1. Shoot RAW + JPEG – this will give me a low res JPEG as well as the RAW. Low res??? This doesn't fly for me when I am doing a Media Center slideshow on my 1080p panel, and besides, who wants two files with the same image floating around on their machine in different formats?
  2. Shoot RAW only – this would require using editing software to laboriously convert my RAW image to JPEG, leaving me with a high res image in both formats, but we are back to the two file conundrum.

This new codec based on the Windows Imaging Components (WIC) architecture, and will allow (as I understand it) for RAW files to be treated in the same way in the Vista Photo Gallery, allowing for viewing and sorting of images based on several dimensions of meta tagging. I hope it will also work from a Media Center Extender device (Xbox 360) for viewing and managing RAW photos as well…

This is a great example of providing customers with interoperability through technology access. By publishing and making available the WIC specifications, Nikon is able to deliver this powerful capability to its customers and provide seamless interoperability with Windows Vista.

You can download the codec directly from here.