Red sues Nikon over compression patents

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A settlement reached before z8 announcement, it is surprising fast and I feel this is no coincidence. Could it be z8 is getting nraw as well? And an impending lawsuit would just be in the way of marketing and public confidence. We will know soon.
 
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I hope you'll forgive me for the necro, but I stumbled on this thread and found it amusing retrospectively, after Nikon acquired RED earlier this year. There's indeed been speculations that the settlement had something to do with the acquisition.

Regarding the "why Nikon and not intoPIX?" argument, though, while the money argument makes perfect sense, I think there's a little more to it.

The lawsuit mentions a series of RED patents, but most of them claim a camera - or an electronic device - with memory, sensor, and a compression method. Only two, US9436976B2 and US9521384B2, first claim a compression method. I think the red-green, blue-green parts are indeed a problem vs RED patent, but an SDK or a codec would have been more difficult for RED to attack because one can't patent only a method in the US; it must be backed up with a device, which RED did with a camera + memory + sensor (we have a somewhat similar constraint in Europe). So it falls on its users. Then, of course, the gain was perhaps less interesting for that company than waiting for camera vendors to use that compression technology and sue them instead of those who created the codec.

The fact RED was allowed to patent such a broad a vague method in the first place was an aberration.

I wonder if Nikon will keep using HE raw in their future cameras, now that they have an alternative that is (I think) more widely supported...
 
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HE* and HE RAW are pretty great imo. I cannot tell a difference looking side by side vs lossless compressed. And they allow for unlimited buffer so you can roll 20 FPS as long as you want. It sort of makes up for lack of RAW pre-capture a bit because you can just shoot away until the thing happens. I've gotten used to just scrolling back through on the back LCD like a video and staring or selecting for upload the actual pose I wanted so I can just delete the rest later. It's like scrolling a couple minute video on YouTube for an exact moment and pretty quick.

The fact that Nikon bought RED as the outcome of this thread is entertaining and also leads to the "will we see RED RAW" questions and "will we see RED's global sensors in Nikon flagships" questions. RED has a pretty nice global sensor right now which would probably shake things up quite a lot if the Z9ii went for it with a higher megapixel global shutter that didn't have major DR compromises. Especially a Non-Sony sensor.
 
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John Navitsky said:
I doubt they will *drop* HE raw for stills. I do think they'll add RED for video, it is a curious question if they'll drop anything.
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I agree. I think it comes from an Adobe employee posting they put any HE further development on hold, a little after RED's acquisition. It was interpreted by some as a decision from Nikon to switch to RED's raw format. It sounded unlikely to me, but the question apparently stuck in my head as a possibility. I haven't followed it, so perhaps it was only a temporary pause for a completely different motive (I don't use Adobe).

The only reason I see to drop HE would be to save silicon, as HE requires a dedicated hardware codec which is incompatible with REDCODE raw. Of course, they'd have to make a chip to support another raw (and 4:2:2, etc. if they drop the first), but I doubt it's a problem - it just takes time. Squeezing both on the same chip might also be very costly, unless they can share common components like memory.

I hope they don't drop HE, though. It's indeed great for stills.
 
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