[Kerrowdown]

Even some Pentax cameras don't output to PEF (K-50, K-500, K-30, K-01)... so that should answer your question.

[newmikey]

I have always used PEF on any of my cameras that supported it. As I do not use any Adobe software, I've never had to even consider using DNG. My GR has DNG as its only native raw format so on that one I use it. Never noticed a whole lot of difference between the raw files out of my K-5 IIS (PEF) and those out of the GR (DNG).

One word of warning however: using DNG as camera-native format is perfectly fine however converting native raw formats to DNG with so-called converters on your PC may not be so fine. Rather than knowing your camera manufacturer built-in the option of DNG into the camera's firmware and you can consider it tried, tested and fully equivalent to a native format such as PEF/NEF/CR2, you'd now be trusting a 3rd-party software developer to be able to "read" the, sometimes non-standard, data in the native raw file and relocate it in a DNG structure.

Just my €0.02

[Hornet]

DNG files are not a "universal" format in the sense that any DNG can be read by software that reads DNG. The software still needs to understand the RAW data produced by the specific camera/sensor. For instance older Lightroom versions that came out before the K3 and did not get an update for the K3 will not be able to read the DNG native to the K3. The DNG must first be down-converted to an older DNG version acceptable to the Lightroom version by using the DNG converter. The converter version must be new enough to understand the data from that camera.

See: https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/kb/camera-raw-plug-supported-cameras.html for an explanation and list of Pentax cameras/DNG and the maximum Lightroom version they work natively with. This should help clear up some confusion.

[bar_foo]

Coming late to this thread, but there's a kind of counter-intuitive reason for shooting PEF rather than DNG: because a DNG made from a PEF file is preferable to one from the camera. Here's why I shoot in PEF, even though I ultimately prefer to work with and archive DNGs: if you shoot in PEF, and have Adobe software convert the PEF to DNG, the resulting file

• is significantly smaller than the out-of-camera DNG (by 15-20% in my tests), even though the PEF is bigger than the DNGs the camera produces (this makes sense because the processor in the camera doesn't have the power or time to compress the image as much as your computer can
• has a checksum for validating file integrity, which the camera DNGs don't--Lightroom will notice if there's file corruption, so you can restore from a backup

It's possible to re-convert DNG files with Adobe's DNG Converter, but not with Lightroom. Since Lightroom can convert PEFs to DNG automatically, choosing PEF makes for a much easier workflow. I've gone back and re-converted all my old photos with DNG Converter, saving several 10s of GBs, and all my new raw images are PEF. The one downside is that the PEFs take up more space, but I rarely fill up a card and always have a spare handy, so that's not a big deal for me.
The above applies to the K-5 II; don't know how it works with newer cameras.

[Hornet]

Bar_foo makes some good points about using PEF. In my experience the out of camera DNG files are slightly smaller than PEF. Regardless which format you choose (PEF or DNG) you can also later compress these further with the DNG converter to save space. What would be really nice would be if Lightroom used a RAW engine that was upgraded regularly no matter what version you have. Unfortunately Adobe would rather force you to upgrade the whole software package (even though the DNG converter provides the same functionality). Just another good reason to use Open Source software rather than be tied to single vendor.