It´s hard to believe these problems persists 2022 because it´s NOT that this type of discussions are new. As I have written earlier Michael Reichmann at Luminous Landscape and a few others lifted the issus with the “RAW Flaw” already in 2005 demanding a common RAW-format beeing the Adobe DNG-format or another business common “Open RAW”- format.
The Raw Flaw - Luminous Landscape (luminous-landscape.com)
Read what they wrote 2005 in the “The RAW Flaw”:
Quote:
" Now we all know that there are quite a few companies that write generic RAW converters. Many of these are small cottage industries and are highly unlikely to be prosecuted by the likes of the large camera makers. But there are larger companies, such as Adobe and Phase One, which are much more tempting targets for lawsuits, and who have litigation and liability lawyers who try and look after their best interests.
This is what has happened in early 2005. Both Adobe with Camera RAW 3.1 and Phase One with Capture One 3.7 have refused to decode Nikon’s new white balance encryption on D2x and D50 camera files. Not that they couldn’t (individual programmers did it days after it was released), but because it exposes these corporations to liability.
This is an unacceptable situation. We can’t fault Adobe and Phase One. They’re simply looking after their own best corporate interests. But who then is looking after our best interests? Apparently no one, and certainly not the camera makers.
We write camera makers (plural) because while Nikon has put itself in the bull’s-eye of consumer scorn, almost all camera makers are guilty of promoting a seemingly never-ending succession of proprietary RAW formats.
This has to stop!
The Solution?
There are two solutions – the adoption by the camera industry of…
A: Public documentation of RAW formats; past, present and future
or, more likely…
B: Adoption of a universal RAW format
Proposal A simply requires that camera makers recognize that they are doing their customers a disservice by hobbling RAW files with various layers of proprietary processes and encryption methodologies. Once I, as the photographer, have pressed the shutter, the image file belongs to me; not Canon, not Nikon, not Pentax, or anyone else. Me! And by putting up roadblocks to my unfettered access to these files, they are acting against my needs and my interests.
Proposal B is a request that camera makers adopt a universal RAW file format. Adobe has put forward the DNG format as an open standard. Is this the one to adopt? We really have no axe to grind, one way or the other. If DNG is seen as a suitable standard, that’s great. A large number of independent software makers have already embraced it, and Leica has adopted it as their native standard for their new Digital Module R for their R8/R9 camera bodies. (End of Quote)
Today I´m fed up with this and have written here about it but it feels like screaming from a boat in a storm in the middle of the Baltic Sea (we had a storm yesterday in Sweden so I got a reminder of how that feels). Now we have to pick up this fight because Michael Reichmann is dead and can´t speak for us anymore. The problem is still there and the bigger camera manufacturers has shown very little or more accuratly none interest at all to solve this never ending issue. So where have all these photo journalist been since Reichmann and 2005!!! Aren´t they supposed to prove themselves at least a little useful for the users they use to say they are speaking for? The Raw Flaw is still a major problem waiting to be solved!
With this said and read where Reichmann earlier wrote about legal matters refusing companies like Adobe, Phase One and DXO to reverse engineer the vendors sometimes “patented” RAW-formats, I´m not sure there are obstacles like that making problems for DXO today. BUT, opening up Photolab so it will be able to open any Sony or Nikon RAW-file just can´t be a problem today when I or any one else can do it by changing the camera code in an unsupported RAW-version to a code of a supported earlier model.