Nikon to acquire RED and make it a subsidiary | Hacker News Reader

Nikon to acquire RED and make it a subsidiary

canonrumors.com

44 pointstiernano10 comments

Hopefully this will be the end of RED's insane patent trolling.

They patented the idea of making raw video, and have successfully sued both Apple and Nikon as well as gotten settlements from other companies over this stupid patent.

To provide more specifics:

Red ripped off JPEG2000, and the derelict USPTO awarded them a patent on it... which was upheld at some point by some equally ignorant judge.

It's such a blatant rip-off that you can actually use an off-the-shelf JPEG2000 decoder to read Red's files.

Until software patents are ruled invalid (as they were supposed to be from the beginning), corporations will continue to use the patent system for exactly what it was supposed to prevent: the theft of other people's work.

Nikon managed to "prevail" over Red in a dispute over these patents, but not in a public-benefiting way. Red folded, but unfortunately their patents were not invalidated. So nobody should be crowing too loudly over this deal.

Years ago you used to be able to open .r3d files after hex editing the magic header numbers with a generic jpeg2000 codec, but that's no longer the case with more modern variations of the file format (they encrypt it), but obviously the core image compression is still fairly similar (wavelets), but it's not like you got high-quality YCrCb data out of the .r3d file that way anyway (as you would if it was a true jpeg2000 file), you'd need to de-bayer it first (hence the two green channels you get, which effectively give it twice the resolution for green - somewhat similar to Chroma encoding like 422).

Dont forget patented RED Mini-Mag. Red alu case holding off the shelf SATA SSD.

Part 1 - RED MINI-MAG - Things you only thought you knew. Inside view, and RED SSD firmware - Jinni.Tech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEzLDqELh70

https://www.cined.com/whats-inside-a-red-mini-mag-the-contro...

Recently discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39625919 (2 days ago, 199 comments)

Did they acquire it again?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39625919

Well as said the message is in the media, nikon news … canon not nikonrumour because red use canon mount …

That was not parseable.

I believe they were saying that the rumors saying Red was going to be acquired Canon not Nikon, due to the fact Red cameras use a Canon mount, were incorrect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com