Anyone else playing with the D2x NEF that's in the wild?

Someone at the Nikon bench at PMA let their guard down

Not exactly the most exciting image, so I thought 'what the hey', and did a single step interpolation to 20x30 inches @300dpi in PSCS after converting with Raw Convertor (a Mac RAW conversion tool that I have been playing with). The area to the upper right is a 100% pixels view of the lock area of the 17-35 lens that is visible in the smaller image below, after resizing, before sharpening.

And the EXIF is there... it looks quite convincing, and looks even more convincing when I pull all the exif data out with a perl script.

So, hmmmm....

FYI: The NEF file is being discussed on the DPreview forum as I write.

Cool! Pretty funny that the first NEF posted was a grab-shot from the booth at PMA.

Thanks for posting Craig. So, PSCS (do you have ACR 2.4?) had no problem opening the NEF? Interesting - I guess I remember reading that Adobe had added support.

What do you think about the sharpness/AA filter? Etc.

Cheers

James

I do have ACR 2.4 (at least, I think I do :?), but it was not happy to open this file. PS can pull out the preview jpeg, but can't open the whole file. That's why I used Raw Developer, which was able to do it (strangely).

Full exif indicates that this is uncompressed raw, 16 bits per channel.

The thing that gets me is just how good it looks after a single step Bicubic smoother interpolation to 20 x 30 @ 16 bit, yielding a 300 and some MB file in one step. Opening the RAW to a 16bit tiff, with some curves and white balance applied by the Raw Developer software took about 1min:45 seconds on my 1GHz G4 laptop. Raw Developer is basically a graphical interface on top of the GPL-licensed DCRAW code, so I expect that the PS CS DC-RAW plugin will do a better job again.