[pete_pf]

Are there any advantages/disadvantages converting to DNG from PEF vs capturing DNG straight from the camera? the only thing I noticed first capturing in PEF is the file turns out to be a few megabytes smaller than when i capture in dng. are there any quality differences, or anything else to consider?

[Warped]

I asked this in the Medium Format folder as the 645D also gives the option of capturing in pef or dng - the consensus was there's no real difference.

For me - I go with dng purely for achival and cross platform reasons. If I had to bet between Adobe and Pentax and who might go under, be bought out, fail ...etc I'd go with Adobe for staying power at the moment.

[cats_five]

Even if Adobe are brought / go into liquidation tomorrow, the software on my PC will continue to work so I'll be able to process the PEFs from my camera. So, I'll stick with PEFs as they are smaller than DNGs and whilst I think I have lots of space on my cards, the day might come when I don't. It seems highly unlikely to me a Windows change will stop CS4 working - all the older versions of PS back to PS7 still work.

The images I work on get saved as PSDs (with all the layers), and any I upload to Flick then get resized to 1024 on the longest side and saved as a JPG as well.

[Wheatfield]

I started shooting DNGs when the K10 came out and Adobe took quite a while to catch up their raw converter.
Something I noticed was that DNGs are backwards compatible, and I can open K5 DNG files on Photoshop CS3 (or even older versions).
Anyway, I continue to shoot DNGs because at some point, I'll buy another camera, and Adobe will again, more than likely, be slow to support the native format.

[jeffshaddix]

I capture in PEF, then convert to DNG when I copy from the card to my NAS. This way I maximize the # of shots I can get on a card, and also maximize compatibility once it's stored in its permanent location.

Adobe has a free standalone DNG converter that can be run on the command-line to facilitate scripting, so I just wrote a quick perl script to automate my entire card to NAS workflow. Good times!

[RioRico]

It doesn't really matter. As mentioned, conversion software will continue to work. And when EMP hits, all our digital files will be gone anyway.

[hcarvalhoalves]

PEF is similar to DNG, but compressed data, specific to Pentax. There are some issues and not all software is able to process Pentax's RAW without losing some data (for instance, the current RAW Converter driver for Mac produces images with a wrong magenta hue due to missing white balance data, I had to fallback mine to version 3.6 to fix it), so you'll have better compatibility with DNG.

Also, DNG is an open format, the specs are available, which means it's more future-proof to archive your pics in this format.

So the file format actually matters a lot, not from a quality/performance perspective, but from a software compatibility one.

[cats_five]

Why should I care if my photos are in an open format or not? I'm not taking masterpieces for the future (so far as I know!), plus ACR knows all about the format I'm using. The format my camera takes isn't going to change so there is no need for my software to change, unless new editing stuff I want comes along - and while Adobe continue to produce Photoshop I'm sure it will be able to read the PEFs from my camera. They add new formats, so far as I know they've never removed one.

[hcarvalhoalves]

Why should I care if my photos are in an open format or not? I'm not taking masterpieces for the future (so far as I know!), plus ACR knows all about the format I'm using. The format my camera takes isn't going to change so there is no need for my software to change, unless new editing stuff I want comes along - and while Adobe continue to produce Photoshop I'm sure it will be able to read the PEFs from my camera. They add new formats, so far as I know they've never removed one.

If you don't care about having access to your photos in the future, why take photos altogether? Many masterpieces from anonymous photographers have been found lost in garage sales, there's no reason for that not to happen with digital photos 20, 30, 40 years from now. And I bet 20 years from now all you know about Windows, Photoshop and crap like that will be gone.

[cats_five]

If it looks like Windows is going I can take steps to change the format of my PEFs - if I think it matters, and if whatever is coming along won't support them. However the crucial link isn't Windows, it's Adobe / Photoshop. My bet is that unless they go under they will continue to support PEFs (plus all those other RAW formats they know about) plus PSDs on whatever comes along to replace Windows. If not there will be a far, far bigger problem than PEFs not being supported.

And remember, if it ever does happen the doom you are predicting comes along, it's not as if the software and my PC will stop working overnight. They won't. There will be no problem exporting the PEFs as DNGs.

IMHO the biggest threat to the survival of my images isn't software, it's hardware. We don't know what the future for software is - the Open Source folks always predict doom & gloom with proprietary software - but we do know that the future for almost all HDDs is that somewhere down the line they will start to fail.

IMHO the biggest issue facing today's images is archiving. At least I have mine on an NAS (with mirrors) as well as on my PC, and the NAS is in a different room in the house. This isn't perfect but it beats having one copy on a PC and another on a DVD hands down.