DxO - a little rant, more of a whinge really...

[StuartR]

DxO has, for a while now, been my RAW converter of choice and I wondered how quickly they'd get support for the 40D in place - mainly because I was to shoot my brother's wedding with my two week old 40D at the beginning of October.

After a couple of weeks it became clear (although it wasn't exactly announced) that the 40D modules would not be made available for DxO v4.x and we'd have to wait for the newly announced v5 to be released at the end of October.

Although I processed all of my brother's wedding photos via CS2, I knew I'd get better results using DxO so I convinced him to wait for v5 before I produced all the enlargements for his wedding album (part of my gift to the bride & groom).

I happen to be on holiday this week so I got myself ready for a conversion fest and kept checking the DxO website and then, on the 30th - I don't belieeeeeve it - they announced v5 wouldn't be ready for another couple of weeks..which, shall we say, made me rather cross . One deadline passed, will they make the next one? I cynically asked myself.

Anyway, the new sister-in-law is not too keen on waiting so I'm going to have to go with my "Photo-shopped" versions now .

Am I being unreasonable? - probably. However it does look like 40D owners are going to have to wait 2 months, possibly longer, for DxO v5 to support us. How many will have moved on to another RAW converter before then I wonder?

Trouble is, DxO is so good I'm going to have

[Stephen]

Re: DxO - a little rant, more of a whinge really...

DxO has, for a while now, been my RAW converter of choice and I wondered how quickly they'd get support for the 40D in place - mainly because I was to shoot my brother's wedding with my two week old 40D at the beginning of October.

After a couple of weeks it became clear (although it wasn't exactly announced) that the 40D modules would not be made available for DxO v4.x and we'd have to wait for the newly announced v5 to be released at the end of October.

Although I processed all of my brother's wedding photos via CS2, I knew I'd get better results using DxO so I convinced him to wait for v5 before I produced all the enlargements for his wedding album (part of my gift to the bride & groom).

I happen to be on holiday this week so I got myself ready for a conversion fest and kept checking the DxO website and then, on the 30th - I don't belieeeeeve it - they announced v5 wouldn't be ready for another couple of weeks..which, shall we say, made me rather cross . One deadline passed, will they make the next one? I cynically asked myself.

Anyway, the new sister-in-law is not too keen on waiting so I'm going to have to go with my "Photo-shopped" versions now : .

Am I being unreasonable? - probably. However it does look like 40D owners are going to have to wait 2 months, possibly longer, for DxO v5 to support us. How many will have moved on to another RAW converter before then I wonder?

Trouble is, DxO is so good I'm going to have

You make an interesting point Stuart, it has to be extremely frustrating when software houses use the launch of a new camera as an excuse to bring out a new version and then previous versions don't support the new equipment.

DXo is of course not the only company who do this, Adobe are just the same and people who use their camera raw software in CS2 now need to upgrade to CS3 in order for their new camera files to be compatible with camera raw. What gets me is that Canon in your case, could surely produce a camera raw file that does not have these compatibility issues, they are all CR2 files after all. Seems to me that its strengthening the case for a universal usage of the DNG format not unlike the JPEG which is universally used. Of course we all know the reasons why they don't do this

[Ian]

Re: DxO - a little rant, more of a whinge really...

Stuart, it takes a mountain of work to physically test and profile all the lenses supported by DxO. Unless Canon provided them with bodies a couple of months before the camera was launched then there was always going to be a delay like this. I'm very confident you will be pleased with the result when it finally arrives though.

Ian

[Andrew Thatcher]

Re: DxO - a little rant, more of a whinge really...

They prob put it back for the Nikon D3 and D300

[StuartR]

Re: DxO - a little rant, more of a whinge really...

I'm sure I'll be happy with v5 Ian but looking at this page:

http://www.dxo.com/intl/photo/dxo_optics_pro/overview/version_5_coming_soon/more_speed_more_cameras

it possibly implies that the new crop of Canon & Nikon cameras may actually not be supported immediately when v5 is released? (this has always been an assumption on my part if I'm honest).

"DxO Optics Pro v5 will also support the latest Canon and Nikon Digital SLR camera bodies. Support for the Canon 40D, Canon 1Ds MKIII, Nikon D300 and Nikon D3 will be included in DxO Optics Pro v5 over the next few months following the availability of these cameras."

Andrew - I'd be a bit miffed if they released Nikon updates before the Canon ones - IIRC the 40D was available before the D300 & D3.

[StuartR]

Re: DxO - a little rant, more of a whinge really...

Well, mid November has passed and the site is now saying "anticipate the release of DxO Optics Pro v5 Windows to occur in the 2nd half of November 2007" Let's hope that's the final deadline.

Interestingly the support forum, hosted by DxO themselves, was apparently taken down while it was moved to a new location - with the message "it will be back in a few hours".

If you try to get to the forum this same message is still being displayed after at least a week by my reckoning....about time they updated it or got the forum back on-line methinks!

Still, I guess at least it stops people like me whingeing on their own forum! .

[Ian]

Re: DxO - a little rant, more of a whinge really...

Well, mid November has passed and the site is now saying "anticipate the release of DxO Optics Pro v5 Windows to occur in the 2nd half of November 2007" Let's hope that's the final deadline.

Interestingly the support forum, hosted by DxO themselves, was apparently taken down while it was moved to a new location - with the message "it will be back in a few hours".

If you try to get to the forum this same message is still being displayed after at least a week by my reckoning....about time they updated it or got the forum back on-line methinks!

Still, I guess at least it stops people like me whingeing on their own forum! :.

Ah well -I'm not the only one to have fallen foul of giving well-meant and sincere promises!

Ian

[StuartR]

Re: DxO - a little rant, more of a whinge really...

Ah well -I'm not the only one to have fallen foul of giving well-meant and sincere promises!

Ian

I'm sure they're well meant Ian. I work in software development and I had a problem delivering on time until I went on an excellent time management course. Well, the food was excellent - I just learnt to say it will take two weeks when I was actually thinking one .

On a positive note, did you realise how much influence this forum wields? The DxO forum went on-line not long after I posted my whinge earlier today!! According to another poster it had actually been unavailable for 2 weeks..

[StuartR]

Re: DxO - a little rant, more of a whinge really...

Well the forums stayed up for a couple of days during which there were a number of negative posts about the new v5 and this morning...the forums are down again.

Must be fun hosting forums relating to your own products!

[Ian]

Re: DxO - a little rant, more of a whinge really...

Well the forums stayed up for a couple of days during which there were a number of negative posts about the new v5 and this morning...the forums are down again.

Must be fun hosting forums relating to your own products!

Forums are not easy to run - I have three of them now

So what are the main moans about v.5?

Ian

[StuartR]

Re: DxO - a little rant, more of a whinge really...

So what are the main moans about v.5?

Ian

[Ian]

Re: Some feedback from DxO

I have some good contacts at DxO and DxO's Luc Marin was (as always) keen to provide some answers, Stuart, so here goes:

Speed of the initial loading of the app (which some claim is up to 10 times slower than version 4.5) and the processing speed when it's ..well, processing.

There have also been a number of posts about poor stability, a number of bugs and lack of support for multi-core processors - one poster on the DxO forum claimed v4.5 used all 4 processors on his quad system, but v5 appeared to use just one. There are issues with 64-bit windows systems as well.

> we have identified an issue with some AMD processors and are working on a fix that should be online in a day or two.

Another poster claims to have been told, by DxO, that if he wants a fast operating v5 he should wait for the Mac version! If true, this is preposterous thing for DxO to say / admit (in my view at least). I for one will not be converting to a Mac just for this app. (this is a non-smirking post Stephen!)



The Canon 40D is now supported but only a small number of lens modules are available. I have 4 fairly common Canon lenses and only one is currently supported - thankfully the one that needs it the most - the EF-S 17-85mm. It looks like there will be another batch of 40D + lens modules released in mid-December.

> correct. More lenses will be supported by mid-December. In the meantime the 40D is supported for many other features (RAW/C, Noise, Lighting, Perspective, etc).

Personally the startup time doesn't worry me that much, it's irritating perhaps but not the end of the world. The processing time is an issue though because I, like most users, was hoping for a marked improvement over v4.5 but I'm finding it slower. IIRC, DxO were planning to make use of the GPU to realise some of the speed improvement - perhaps my 512MB ATI Radeon card is not supported. I've not come across a list of supported GPUs or GPU technology requirements to check this.


> the patch should also address some of these issues, in particular the launch speed. More news soon. I hope your forum visitors are noticing improvement in the display speed when they are loading/preparing images.

In terms of the bugs, I'm only seeing one so far and it's not a major issue - just a warning message that's not being cleared down when it should be.


Perhaps I'll offer a more considered review when I've spent a bit more time with it and got the hang of the revised user-interface.



Despite all this I still think DxO is a great app - especially if v4.5 covers your camera(s) & lens(es).


Perhaps we'll get some patches soon that will sort some of the v5 issues out.

Hope that helps and thanks, Luc for getting back to me so fast!

Cheers,

Ian

[StuartR]

Re: DxO - a little rant, more of a whinge really...

Thanks Ian, I'm really impressed with this , thanks for taking the time. It's not often you get such a personalised response from a manufacturer.

I've seen Luc posting on the DxO forums before and, although they state that they don't provide support via the forums, they obviously read them (which they should of course).

I'm running a batch of 38 pics through DxO at the moment, it's taking time to do the individual adjustments but I've already decided I quite like most of the revised interface. The acid test though, will be how long the batch processing takes and I'll try and ascertain if it's using both processors in my dual-core chip.

[Ian]

Re: DxO - a little rant, more of a whinge really...

Thanks Ian, I'm really impressed with this , thanks for taking the time. It's not often you get such a personalised response from a manufacturer.

I've seen Luc posting on the DxO forums before and, although they state that they don't provide support via the forums, they obviously read them (which they should of course).

I'm running a batch of 38 pics through DxO at the moment, it's taking time to do the individual adjustments but I've already decided I quite like most of the revised interface. The acid test though, will be how long the batch processing takes and I'll try and ascertain if it's using both processors in my dual-core chip.

I'd tended to assume that multiple processor compatible applications could claim a whole processor or core, while the rest of the system worked off the other core.

Are you running an AMD CPU?

Ian

[StuartR]

Re: DxO - a little rant, more of a whinge really...

No, I'm running an Intel chip, a CPU530 LGA775