A Plea for DNG – Again

What Camera Companies Do With Raw Files
Is Against Photographer’s Best Interests

It’s that time of year when newly announced cameras are hitting the stores. This means that they are also crossing my desk for review. It’s a fun time, with one exception. Raw files.

The camera industry, with just a handful of exceptions, continues to insist on proprietary raw files. Every single new camera as it’s introduced produces a proprietary raw file which can not be read by any previous image processing software. This means that until Adobe, Phase One, DxO and others get around to writing support for the new file format for each and every new camera as it comes out, the user is forced to download, install and use the manufacturer’s proprietary raw processing software.

This is madness!
This is not in the best interest of us, the customer.
This is not in the best interest of even the camera makers themselves.

It must be said that the manufacturer’s proprietary raw software is mostly crap. Some are more crap that others (Silkypix is a particularly egregious offender), but compared to richly-featured, excellently designed and fully featured software such as Lightroom, Capture One and DxO Optics Pro they are poorly featured and mostly unproductive. Sure, they may do a decent job of processing the camera company’s raw files, but that doesn’t make them worth using.

There is no reason for this. None. Absolutely none. Proprietary raw software is an insult to camera users. No one uses camera maker’s own software unless they have a gun held to their heads. Meaning – Lightroom, Camera Raw and other top tier programs don’t have their support written yet.

The Solution – DNG

Though it has been available for more than a decade, the adoption of the DNG format (Wikipedia reference) by the camera industry has been woefully slow and inadequate. To my knowledge, among the majors only Pentax, Ricoh and Leica have adopted DNG as their primary raw format, or as a user-selectable option in-camera.

Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, Olympus and just about every other camera maker continue to force proprietary raw formats on us. Think about it. Your raw pictures can not be used in any way unless you use the manufacturer’s software (no matter how bad this may be – and some is really bad), or until some third party, such as Adobe or DxO, gets around to building support into their next software release.

Why is this the case? Good question. As a businessman, and a photographer, I can not see any reason for camera makers hanging onto proprietary raw formats except due to irrational corporate pride. Or, it’s the not-invented-here syndrome, which is all too prevalent in some countries and industries. And, the sad irony is that some of this crap software isn’t even written by the camera makers themselves; it’s from small local third-party software houses.

I’ve now been riding this hobby-horse since 2004, and I guess I’ll continue to rant about the issue until camera makers wake up and smell the coffee. I repeat…

This is madness!
This is not in the best interest of us, the customer.
This is not in the best interest of even the camera makers themselves.

Michael – July, 2015

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