Originally posted by Barry Pearson There will be "PEFs from K-1s" around. Will they be sufficient to decide how to perform high quality raw conversions in the new software, without being able to test by experimenting with a camera?
Uhmmm, what? Do you think those files go stale over time?
Quote: So now some features of DNG, including some DNG metadata values for a large range of cameras, are openly available. So in future software will be able to benefit from DNG metadata when processing non-DNG raw files for cameras supported by dcraw. Perhaps in future many people will use PEF in-camera and (perhaps unknowingly) end up with a raw conversion that relies on DNG metadata values.
That makes absolute zero sense whatsoever. I'll drop this discussion as it seems to be a repeat of incoherent statements.
Assuming the camera firmware is capable of generating DNG as well as PEF, both are 100% proprietary to Pentax and both contain metadata that existing Adobe software may not correctly interpret until it is updated. Assuming you take either the PEF and convert it on your computer to DNG, you will loose that proprietary metadata. Any DNG manipulated by software on your PC and restored will likely strip that same proprietary data.
Given a Pentax camera which can use either PEF or DNG natively, both formats will contain hinting and (meta)data which is proprietary to a new camera model, neither format will be converted correctly by 3rd-party software (including Adobe's) until it is updated to take the new features into account notwithstanding the fact that Adobe software may be able to extract some image data early on (although even that has proven troublesome in the past). DNG as a format is no more "futureproof" than any other raw format in use today.
Heck, opensource software got to decoding pixelshift images (both DNG as well as PEF) way before Adobe ever did and still has PS movement detection which is miles ahead of ACR.