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The problem with phone raws is that either:

1. They're not raw, they're aligned and merged and denoised and sharpened just like this iPhone photo (they're just linear so you can adjust white balance and recover shadows, working with them the way you could a real raw file)

or

2. They look like total garbage, noisy as heck and horribly soft, because the sensors are tiny and the lenses are simultaneously limited by diffraction and refractive error.



The raw mode for these wouldn't be a single image. It would be a video with lots of low-quality frames. Then your "raw processing" would be deciding how to align and Marge the frames, which to drop...

I think the idea that raw is a 2d array of pixels is outdated by the way modern cameras, especially smartphone cameras work.


You could do that, but most raw processing software is not equipped to handle tile-based aligning and merging so nothing would support it...


For sure, and that is likely part of the reason that their "raw" options are a flattened image.


They just need to offer an option without aggressive processing, they don't need to try to make it competitive with dedicated cameras.


It does exist, it's option #2. It sucks.




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