Convert to DNG or not to convert, that is the question

[john beardsworth]

t, it also occures to me that Tiff is probably a better archival firmat, even windows can open those.

To remind you, TIF isn't your original capture data.

[deejjjaaaa]

So apart from the archival value (objections tend to be along the lines of "hey, we'll surely have time to fix the roof when we see the storm clouds")

real objections are that Adobe DNG converters in many cases either discards the part of raw data (many Pentax and Nikon raw files) or completely destroys it (Sigma .X3F raw files) and so on

, the key pluses are embedded previews and safely-embedded metadata, and how you can then take advantage of them in diverse workflows.

embedded previews only if you are using Adobe raw converters tools - other raw converters do not do this (or do not work w/ DNG at all or do not work with DNG fully and so on) so the value of that is zero for people who either do not use Adobe raw converters or use more than one raw converters according to the task... and out of LR using crowd most using the same LR for DAM and store images in LR database - so the point of having embedded previews and not having .xmp files is moot

[deejjjaaaa]

There's an inherent long-term plus in the format being publicly documented

with the camera manufacturers who use it (like Pentax) still being able to write undocumented content into a documented tag - so you know where it is (and can extract as a big binary chunk of data), but you still don't know what it is and how to interpret that 

[john beardsworth]

Isn't there an "ignore" button for this forum? Your style of irrelevant nitpicking and argument by contradiction and misinformation made debate with you impossible on another forum.

[digitaldog]

Andrew, I really would like to know the pluses. 

See: http://www.ppmag.com/reviews/200709_adobedng.pdf

In addition, the ability to embed a DNG profile you use for the current rendering, the ability to build a pretty high quality JPEG you can extract and print without having to deal with a raw rendering processes.