Nikon just gave us the NEF Codec 1.10.0. Guess what it does for us? It supports their newer cameras of course. It also has a few other tweaks around color processing and distortion control.

Would you like to know what additional operating systems are supported? None! Yeah, that’s right. None! Vista 64-bit was released in November of 2006, almost 4 years ago. Yet still no 64-bit OS support from Nikon. What’s the deal guys? Adobe is all over it, with some of the software in CS5 requiring 64-bit. Where are you at Nikon? Oh that’s right, you’re doing a whole lot of nothing. I suppose you’re going to continue to be as ridiculous as Alpine and Parrot and just keep flogging the dead horse. They’re being stubborn and not supporting the newer platforms either. At least those guys are doing device level programming which can get kinky when you start to mix architectures. File format manipulation shouldn’t have these issues so it’s kind of ridiculous that Nikon won’t upgrade their tool chain and port it. Hell, release the source code, I’m sure it would take some open source developers all of about 3 days to port it for you.

So yeah. A new release. Great! I guess we’ll just keep having to buy 3rd party software to view/manipulate NEF files or be forced to shoot the reduced quality JPG. Oh well, whatever. Everyone’s workflow uses 3rd party products now anyway. Thanks for nothing Nikon.

For reference, this is the 3rd post I’ve made on this crap. I’ve been ranting for quite a while on this subject and if you’re tired of hearing about it, feel free to write someone at Nikon. I’m certainly tired of constantly ranting about it Here’s the link to the NEF Codec product page for those 32-bit users who want to download it and so Nikon’s web guys will see this post via the referrer link.

Looks like Nikon put out that update for the NEF Codec that I was asking for.

It officially supports W7 now, even though the 1.8.0 release worked from what I read. Still no 64-bit support for Vista / W7. So hey, thanks for nothing!

Seriously though… what’s the hold up? Are you using some 3rd party library in your code that’s not available in 64-bit or are you just too cheap and/or lazy to upgrade your development tools? Come on now, 64-bit Windows is coming. Almost all new servers are 64-bit and a significant portion of Windows 7 installations will be 64-bit. Get with the program already! NEF Codec 2.0 needs to get here and it needs to be 64-bit.