JEITA publishes drafts for EXIF v2.21, DCF 2.0
By
Mike Tomkins
(Sunday, July 20, 2003 - 02:14 EDT)
An email from an anonymous IR reader tells us that JEITA - the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association - has published drafts of two new proposed standards for digital cameras and related products.
Both drafts are open to comment from July 11th to September 10th 2003, and both update existing standards. The proposed update to the DCF standard (DCF stands for "Design rule for Camera File system") would have two purposes.
The first purpose is to remove the current limitation in the DCF format which specifies that image data in DCF basic files be recorded assuming playback using the sRGB color space. While this is mostly acceptable for consumer uses, professional applications generally require less restrictive color spaces - so the new DCF 2.0 standard would allow for files to optionally use the Adobe RGB color space. DCF 2.0 files in the Adobe RGB color space would have filenames starting with an underscore character, "_". Tags indicating white point, primary chromaticities, YCbCr coefficient and gamma would be recorded, along with a newly defined interoperability index value and a different value for the color space tag.
A second purpose of the DCF update would be to correct certain erroneous or unclear wording in the DCF 1.0 specification to make it easier to understand.
Exif 2.21, meanwhile, aims to update the "Exchangeable image file format for digital still cameras" to match the proposed DCF 2.0 standard. Exif 2.21 adds a new gamma tag and changes the definition of the color space and flash tags. It also updates the permissible values of the interoperability index, file source and transfer function tags, and corrects some errors and unclear text.
To see the updated DCF 2.0 draft, click here. The Exif 2.21 draft can be found here. Information on commenting can be found on the JEIDA website...
Thanks to
an anonymous reader
for this item!
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