now i will know what to avoid if i ever buy an expensive camera

"Camera manufacturers continue to use different proprietary RAW file formats despite the 20-year existence of Adobe's open-source DNG (Digital Negative) format, creating ongoing compatibility challenges for photographers and software developers."

Because transitioning offers nothing to those manufacturers or their customers. DNG was created by Adobe because it was in Adobe's interest. Referring to it as "open-source" is just a ploy to stir up a base, photographers using RAW formats are not concerned with open source, they are concerned with quality and support. Those "proprietary RAW file formats" provide quality and support.

It's more complex than the article suggests.

Somewhat ironically, the problem DNG proports to solve is a problem the format itself experiences. Yes, it is true that the camera manufacturers update their image formats and it takes time for companies to catch up. But at the same time the DNG format is on it's 7th iteration, if your camera is using the 2023 version of DNG but your software only supports up to the 2021 version of DNG, it's exactly the same problem as if you've got a 2023 version from your Canon camera but your software only supports up to 2021 version.

Plus as a container format, anybody can put whatever they want in the file and you still need the matching codec for that piece of the content. In many ways it's like so many other audio and video formats, the file can be opened but the specific codec is still required.

Seems to me that DNG and RAW are separate issues: RAW is a bunch of good 'ol bare-metal, hardware-dependent formats. I'd hate to let Adobe dictate how my hardware works. That said, there's nothing stopping cameras from emitting DNGs as a secondary derived format same way they emit JPGs.

This is only a problem for people with $500+ cameras AND feel the need to tweak their pictures beyond cropping out exes and rando bystanders. The 99% of us who are happy with pics from our phones don't really care.

TMK, a Canon/Sony/Nikon RAW will render consistently. I can confirm DNGs DO NOT CONSISTENTLY RENDER. They consistently render in Lightroom. Want to open in Capture One? or Apple's DNG viewer?...good luck. Adobe Lightroom uses DNGs to store destructionless edits. This is horrific for a few reasons:

1. Your edits are typically lost if you open with another program.

2. There's no guarantee you won't lose your edits in the distant future if Adobe changes their software.

3. There's no option in Adobe's software to force a final edit. So if you crop out 3/4 of the photo, your file size is still the same, wasting all those bytes...when, let's be real...you won't edit this 10 years down the road, but now you're paying Adobe's exorbitant cloud storage fees to store this file. Additionally, if there was a final edit, it would guarantee your changes are permanent and viewable across platforms or even future versions of lightroom

4. Adobe doesn't even support DNG very well any more. Their latest Lightroom Cloud version buries that option and tries to force you save RAW

I have 10 years of family photos in DNG. I regret that decision deeply. I converted them all to JPG and have never been happier. I will never make that mistake again. Adobe is probably the worst software company out there. They're very anti-consumer and Lightroom was a massive debacle.

For those who don't know. They had a decent program for 20 years ago named Lightroom. However, it BREAKS and corrupts data if opened from another location, so you can't use it with Dropbox between your desktop and laptop, for example. This is because it internally uses a database to store your edits that writes data on close. Also, since it writes the edits in a DB, you don't see them unless you export. It also has shockingly horrid performance. So they create a cloud-native version. They name it Lightroom and the original one "Lightroom classic"...which is the dumbest decision in the history of software.

OK, so their new Lightroom (let's call it LR Cloud) SUUUUUUCKS. It has about 1/10th of the features, but it performs well and works cloud natively and they charge a monthly fee to use it. The fee is reasonable until you realize it doesn't support local storage. You can export, but until recently, not really read from local storage. So now you have a dead product they barely support and forces you to use a single machine. You have a cloud native one that until 10 years after it was released, was largely useless.

And the worst part? Because the new product is named "Lightroom" everytime you google something, like "Lightroom tethering," it will open a 15 year old blog post explaining how to do it on the old version, but not the new.

How badly do you want to depend on this company to steward the ability for software to read photos of your children? DNG was a disaster and can't be trusted. Adobe is one of the least trusted names in software by their users. Being a Lightroom customer is a lot like being an Oracle RDBMS user...you use it because you're afraid of the competitors with your valuable data, but you hate every step of it and curse it and think "There's got to be a better way" every time....but people are very risk averse with their photos and their data...so it's a profitable product.

Finally, RAW formats are very specific to manufacturers and their hardware. Canon stores dual pixel info, for example, that can slightly alter focus. There are a lot of minor proprietary features that are here today and gone tomorrow and will vary widely by model. Standardizing that would be a disaster. Camera bodies are not a commodity to standardize. They're expensive professional instruments that experts tweak to eeeek out the tiniest of performance benefits or useful features. The manufacturers have good reasons to avoid anything from Adobe, especially DNG and the users would hate the result.

Want to fix the problem the author is complaining about? How about a good

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