Even if you do that, without decapping the ISP and microprobing it, you might have issues.
(You’re better off figuring out how to crack the firmware decryption, decrypt it, and feed the results to IDA assuming it’s a “known” CPU architecture. Beyond my skillset, not necessarily beyond the skillset of the likes of leegong… To explain who he is, it’s probably best to just say “google his name”, or find any thread related to camera reverse engineering. If it’s related to REing a camera-related component, leegong has probably stopped by. He provided some INCREDIBLY useful insight on the Sony E-mount protocol obtained via firmware disassembly that corrected some rather “how the hell did I get that one wrong?” bogus assumptions/observations I had made…)
In an ideal situation, you could feed exact numbers into the camera’s image processing pipeline, but in the real world - you can’t, for example, easily feed a camera a fake single hot pixel.
While it would be nice to assume that RAW is actually RAW, there’s no shortage of evidence that RAW cooking happens on a regular basis, such as:
- The whitebalance prescaling Iliah is fairly certain is happening based on certain statistical anomalies in raw histogram analysis
- Effectively “smoking gun” evidence of spatial noise reduction occurring - basically universal for any camera which advertises “extended ISO” modes, and I recall recently one of the DPR gurus caught a camera manufacturer doing it at shockingly low ISO settings.
- Spatial hotpixel rejection
- Automatic dark frame subtraction
- Some Sony cameras appear to be performing some partial component of their vignetting correction on RAW data. Current prevailing theory is that they are compensating for microlens interaction with the lens based on exit pupil distance reported by the lens, leaving more lens-specific as opposed to sensor-dependent behaviors uncorrected.
- Sony replaces OSPDAF sensel data with interpolated data derived from adjacent pixels. Good for analysts who want to figure out what OSPDAF sensel structure a new Sony camera has.
- Someone who was (if I recall correctly) a retired camera firmware engineer indicated that some of the flatfield correction behaviors described by @Jossie may actually be fairly routine/common. This is from the unfortunate category of “I’m positive I saw someone say this, I even have a guess between one of 4-5 people who it was, but DPR’s search function sucks so badly I’ll never be able to find it again.”.
I know of one case where I know EXACTLY who said something on DPR but can’t find the post in question… Which would be nice to find again because the post in question debunks a commonly regurgitated marketing-department-originated myth regarding how the Sigma MC-11 works when a Sigma Global Vision lens is attached.