DNG — Whaddyathink?

Hi, Jim. Congrats on the new camera.

The last time I read about DNG–a few months ago or more–Adobe stated clearly that the DNG format contained some but not all of the information from the original Raw file. They recommended that you back up both the original Raw file and the DNG file.

To me, that’s pretty worthless. Why go through the bother of converting? That’s like storing Word files as text files. If I ever need to do it in the future, it will be far faster to do it on whatever 30 TeraHerz computer I might have in 2011 rather than slog through it now on the *chance* that it might become a standard.

That’s not to say I think DNG is a bad idea. I just don’t think it’s ready for prime time yet.

Since every RAW format is different, as every camera has it’s own quirks, a standard will always be a compromise. The question is whether DNG is a good/flexible enough compromise.

Lou’s comments are fair enough. But I would point out that Office apps now tend to use XML, as that’s an open standard and it seems to do the job …

The main thing to note is that, in th ecomputer world, whatever you have today will be old hat tomorrow. You will have unreadable media full of files in outdated formats of data that seems very limited.

Camera manufacturers do utilize proprietary information withing their respective RAW formats. Statements issued by the companies involved state that the reason for this is to protect sensitive data about how their cameras work. Nikon seems to be leaning towards even more protection and sheltering (encrypting) of parts of their RAW data, while Canon appears to be watching and waiting. How Fuji stands on the matter is something I haven’t researched. None of the camera manufacturers seem to be rushing forward to embrace DNG (Nikon is actively, some say in an openly hostile manner, going the opposite way).

Even though to the consumer it would appear that opening up RAW formats to software companies like Adobe is a good thing, it’s looking like the camera manufacturers are in either no hurry to do so or are plainly opposed. Given the various factions involved (yes, Adobe is a faction and who the ‘bad’ guys are in this dispute isn’t necessarily clear cut), I find myself firmly on the side of the photographers (consumers). Photographers feel that they own what they shoot and shouldn’t have to be dependent on the whims of the camera manufacturers in producing the ‘Tower of Babel’ plethora of RAW formats and proprietary decoding software. Adobe put an offer on the table in the form of the DNG format. As long as camera manufacturers feel that open knowledge of certain data in their formats would reveal technical/trade secrets of their cameras, DNG faces a gloomy uphill battle. Companies like Adobe and Phase One will have to continue to operate with the scanty information provided by SDKs and creative reverse engineering, making their own best guesses.

Personally, I feel that unless a company like Canon and/or Kodak publically open up and embrace the DNG formats, DNG is likely to wallow around as an interesting side note. I would find it highly amusing if it were discovered that Canon was sitting on the fence for the sole purpose of letting Nikon go so far against a format like DNG that if/when Canon would accept DNG that it would effectively hamstring Nikon and leave Canon with complete dominance of the DSLR market (along with anything else that puts out RAW files).