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I have an SLT camera (Sony A7R2) and while it has a raw output interface for video (via microHDMI out), it doesn't seem to have any way of outputting RAW apart from writing it onto the SD card.

My question: is there any way, maybe inside the camera, to connect some sort of interface and take it out of the camera? Alternatively, maybe there's a way to coerce the camera to transmit the still image via microHDMI? In any case, my idea is to grab the image, then do some image processing externally and save the image somewhere.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ What does Sony say about this? Have you tried asking them? Low probability of finding an EE on this site who might have this camera and knows the answer. \$\endgroup\$ – Andy aka Jan 14 '17 at 11:28
  • \$\begingroup\$ More a hardware hacking and / or reverse engineering question than EE as described in the scope of this EE stack. \$\endgroup\$ – jippie Jan 14 '17 at 11:44
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Most "pro-sumer" cameras will indeed take "raw" images and store them to the SD card. You can retrieve the images in near-real time by using the USB interface to read them from the card. Most cameras in that class have an available PC software support library and API to support this. I can't speak about the Sony camera specifically; most of my work in aerial photography pods has been with the Canon EOS T1i-T5i series of cameras.

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No, the camera is unlikely to expose the raw image at any point other than possibly the sensor connection to the DSP/MCU. The internal logic is likely to be highly integrated for cost reasons, using a custom ASIC to provide the processing functions.

Even what is saved as RAW will most likely have been processed and conditioned, this is simply the highest fidelity version of the image which is present in the processing path.

If the camera is able to stream data to a user connector, there might be test modes but I'm dubious about this. Even if they exist, accessing these test modes will be difficult. A USB remote-control interface is your best chance, if it is provided.

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