Is Aperture Useful with unsupported digital cameras like FujiFilm S100FS?

Question

I have been evaluating and comparing Apple Aperture with Adobe Lightroom. For me, Aperture would be my preference if my camera was supported. Note that I already am using Photoshop CS5, but could use the supplemental organizing capabilityies of Aperture.
Apple does not support my camera's raw format (Fujifilm Finepix S100FS). To make matters worse, it does no good to convert the raw files to the standard DNG format because Apple does not even support that format for this camera. Apple states that some cameras are not supported in DNG because they have different types of sensor. And one of the reasons I purchased the Fujifilm camera is that it sports a larger sensor (to capture more light).
Aperture does support TIFF files, however. So I considered the idea of converting files to TIFF before importing them into Aperture. An interesting aspect of this is that TIFF files tend to be very very large.
For example, compare the following file sizes (for the same photo):
Camera Raw direct from the camera (16 bits per pixel): 23.7 MB
Converted to very high quality JPEG (8 bits): 7.9 MB
Converted to TIFF using Finepix software (16 bits) 133.3 MB
Converted to TIFF with Esif using Finepix S/W (8 bits) 66.7 MB
Converted to TIFF using Adobe Photoshop (8 bits) 33.2 MB
Converted to CNG using Adobe DNG Converter (16 bits) 31.9 MB
It appears that the best route may be to use the Photoshop conversion to TIFF. But I would be concerned that the reduction from 16 to 8 bits may limit my ability to do extensive editing without ending up with high pixelizing results. One can see that working with the camera raw image would provide greater flexibility and use less disk space - if only it was supported.
I like the features of Apple Aperture. But, I am not willing to pay the price associated with the lack of camera support. I think that Aperture would be an asset to me if it was not for this great shortcoming. I am not currently interested in Lightroom 2 since it is a couple of years old and does not support sound and movie files to the same extent as Aperture. I may be able to use the sound organizational capabilities of Aperture since music is also one of my hobbies.
Has anyone else run into this type of problem? Is there something that I am missing? Is Aperture at all useful for a person with a camera that is not supported by Apple?
Message was edited by: Kelvinband

Answer 1

I guess the answer is digital is new and there is a lot of fighting for the Top Spot.
The way i figured things out was like this.
Best tool to do the job is what i wanted. What works for me, because i don't want to work for a computer or a camera. (but i have to) When i started looking i found Apple were the ones who seemed to make something that came nearest to working for me and not the other way round.
Of course Aperture is still very useful as it is a mega powerful Organisation tool.
If i were in your position now i would think new camera. Aperture will still be around long after your camera and hopefully getting better along the way. The camera won't, thats for sure.
A possible short, half term solution if Apple intend to support it in the near future. Would be import pairs then discard the jpegs when raw is supported.
Sorry probably not the answer you wanted.
Allan