Originally posted by Barry Pearson Theories are nice, but it must work right in practice.
Just think about this simple fact: it's impossible for the DNG file to contain any
more information than the original RAW file. At least not unless someone manually adds it. So then what is the advantage of DNG?
And why don't you show me any serious photo archivist on the planet who won't work with whatever odd format of negative or positive he has if he cares about the photograph? So what would stop him from using a PEF file when the software that can read it I readily available?
DNGs fall on their own lack of merit or execution. But Adobe itself inspires even less confidence. I've worked with companies that bought into the "open" PDF format early on. They decided to store all of their documents in that format. I'm talking about larger corporations, many of whom scan or generate over a million pages a day. Only a few years later they found they couldn't read their early generation PDF files - the format had changed and even Adobe's latest software couldn't read them! Guess who's gone back to scanning into TIFF files?
Only DNG seems to be able to take a perfectly good file and make it less usable. So the answer is "NO, the same criticisms don't all apply to the camera makers' own files."
If even casual users have problems with DNG files
today (apparently I'm not the only one, even in this short thread) how can you seriously advocate it as a format to keep these files in for the
future? The mere "promise" of the
possibility that the DNG format
may become well executed 20 years from now does not make it suitable for implementation today - or any time in the near future.