Raw and DNG

Question

Have been successfully using RAW and DNG conversion with Canon 20D in CS3. New Canon 5D Mark II. No longer able to covert to DNG or open RAW files. Have downloaded updates RAW 4.6 and corresponding DNG converter that are supposed to work in CS3. Still not able to open or convert. Any siggestions?

Answer 1

I can understand being angry when you find out your camera isn't supported by Adobe, as I remember I was, too, just not being angry enough to find JPG or DPP adequate instead of spending $200 on an upgrade.  Adobe needs to pay their employees and not waste our money by hiring more people to keep all their old versions up-to-date, so once I got over being angry, I was ok with their policy.  I suppose it's possible you'd need to upgrade your computer, again, to run CS4 or CS5, and that would be more than $200.  My old computer will barely run CS4 and I don't have a 5D.2 so you're one step ahead of me.
Anyway, to summarize what the alternatives would be if you weren't avoiding them out of protest:
1)  Upgrade Photoshop to a version that supports your camera, which would be CS4 or CS5 next spring.  This would cost $200 unless you had to upgrade your computer again. 
2)  Manually copy your files from your CF card to your hard drive, then use the DNG Converter 5.5 to convert them to DNGs, then Bridge and ACR can work with them.  This is free.
Another alternative I will mention, because this is what I do, is to use Lightroom, and then edit things in Photoshop if your processing requires it.  Mine rarely does, anymore.
I used to shoot JPG and use Paintshop Pro to adjust my images and that worked until I found myself in a situation where I needed to correct white-balance more than worked well with JPGs, so I converted to shooting RAW, with a temporary phase of RAW+JPG because I wasn't sure. 
Once I was doing RAW, it only took me a day or two to reject using DPP as very annoying.  So I started using Bridge/ACR/Photoshop to process everything.  At one point an independent company had a program call RAW Shooter, where they gave away the "lite" version for free, and it did a reasonable job.  Of course Adobe bought them out, and then released a wonderful program called Lightroom based on the idea and some of the technology.  Lightroom costs $300 for the initial version, $100 for major upgrades that mirror the Photoshop major upgrades, and has free minor updates for new cameras that correspond to the free interim ACR updates.
If Photoshop, itself, does what you want, and it's only ACR that you want to update whenever you get a new camera, then Lightroom is a cheaper alternative to updating Photoshop just to get a new ACR version.
As I said, I love Lightroom, and would hate to go back to use Bridge/ACR as my main processing model, again, let along use DPP or shoot JPGs.
The next version of Lightroom, LR3, which improves the detail rendering and color-noise-reduction (so far) is available for beta testing until April 2010, from http://labs.abobe.com/  It doesn't have luminance noise-reduction enabled because that is apparently still a work-in-progress after Adobe has fundamentally changed their RAW rendering algorithm and luminance NR is the quite difficult to accomplish, but Adobe wanted user-feedback on their new rendering and color NR without waiting to perfect the luminance NR.
I am enjoying using the beta although I have to go to Photoshop to use the Noise Ninja plug-in for higher ISO images.