Aperture DNG support.

Question

Hi,
As a new Aperture user I must say that I am really very impressed and prefer it to Lightroom. However, whilst my main camera (a Konica Minolta 5D) IS supported, my old Fuji isn't.
Now I appreciate that there are many threads about DNG support and or the lack of support for many popular cameras. But wouldn't it make more sense for people to ask Apple to concentrate on supporting DNG proper, rather than adding lots of support for old cameras.
If it did truly support DNG the problem would be solved. They could continue to add support for the majority of major new cameras, but those of us with large collections of files, from old and unsupported cameras wuld also be catered for.
Surely proper DNG support is more important than supporting XY or Z camera. With DNG everything would be supported.
Makes sense, does it not?
iMac Intel Core Duo 17"   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   1 GB Ram

Answer 1

I thought that conversion to DNG was suppose to
protect you if the original raw format went out of
use and there were no converters available for that
raw format.
This is a false hope.
As noted, DNG only stores the RAW photosite data, translated into a form that programs can easily get at. It actually cannot even do this much for all cameras today, but let's pretend it could.
So you have the raw photosites - now what? Now you have to do the hard job of de-mosaicing the data, converting all of the seperate r,g,b values into real pixels. But wait, not all of the cameras use the same pattern - in particular Fuji. So you have a RAW converter reading a DNG that may run into an "unexpected" pattern it knows not how to convert.
The sad thing is, the worry you had about not being able to read RAW files in the future is already solved by a program called "DCRaw". This source code, free for all, lays out exactly how to read this exact same RAW photosite data from a file and even de-mosiac it (though a simple de-mosaicing). If you save off a RAW file on a disc along with a copy of DCRaw I can guarantee that in 100 years you will be able to use that code to parse that file.
Consider from this the other aspect of DNG I really don't like - if you have a DNG file, you have no way of knowing what is REALLY in that file. Is is pre-converted linear RAW data? Is it straight-up bayer pattern data? Is it a Fuji rotated data with extra dynamic range sensors? You can't know from the extension, and as a result have no idea if any programs you have will parse it correctly or not. At least with JPG or TIFF or even a normal RAW file, either a program reads that format or it can't. With DNG you will pretty much always have a subset of DNG files you cannot read.
So my question is, if you can always be sure you can read a RAW file in the future, and you can't be sure conversion to DNG will let any program but Photoshop read your file - what is the point? There are two things it gives you that make life a little easier, one is smaller file sizes (if you opt not to keep the original RAW and trust the conversion drops no data), the other is ease of adding metadata into the file itself. The first I would say is not as crucial as HD space is pretty cheap, the second is useful but you can always use sidecar files with RAW files - and that's only a burden if you need to move away from a managed editing solution like Lightroom or Aperture.
Some cameras are starting to use DNG directly as a native RAW format but I've already stated why I think that is not a good idea - with DNG you don't know if it's a RAW file direct from some camera or an alien format that holds data you don't know how to parse.