It would seem that Nikon still considers the camera + raw conversion software as a proprietary system that they optimize for globally.
So it appears, yes. But aside from those few companies directly supporting DNG as an in-camera RAW format -- they all seem to have this attitude.
They might forget in the way that most people shooting with Nikon high end DSLRs do not use Capture NX.
A significant improvement in that program's user interface might go quite a distance toward increasing its popularity...but major UI redesigns can be hugely expensive -- and the company (and Nik Software) would have to become willing to face the issue head-on to begin with. This is a difficult thing for development teams with a serious emotional investment in the "rightness" of their user interfaces...
[...]it is unclear whether Adobe, Phaseone,... will all be able to implement a chromaric aberation correction as tuned as Nikon's own. DxO might come out on top... :)
I would love to see some of these companies adopt a strategy used by the admittedly rather odd program SilkyPix, which does a reasonable job of correcting chromatic aberration. You can use the sliders -- the typical approach -- but SP introduced one extremely convenient innovation: hover the mouse over an area where there is "CA", right-click, and then select the menu item "Correct chromatic aberration here." Immediately, the program does an acceptable job of removing the defect -- and if not, you can fine-tune it with the sliders afterward. Usually the fine-tuning is not required. This can save a substantial amount of time during a long editing session and is the kind of convenience for which computers were designed.
DxO: I loved the output I got from this program's evaluation version. Oh, how I want to love this program. And how frustrating it is, how slow they are to introduce camera+lens modules -- for example, for the D3s. By the point at which they've done a decent job of supporting D3s/lens combinations, Nikon will have introduced some miraculous new camera body, and the DxO Cycle of Lens Module Despair will begin all over again. :-/ (Significant improvements in DNG support and in highlight-correction are also needed; the midtone/shadow/gamma controls are superb, though.)
Of course nearly all of the corrections are available whether or not there is direct support. However, the one I have found near-miraculous -- the remarkable lens-unsharpness correction -- requires a module. People tell me that Lightroom 3's sharpening is substantially improved. I haven't used it yet. It is hard to imagine other programs doing as good a job as DxO in this regard, though. Up to now I found that the only sharpening tool I could live with is the very effective, but glacially slow, plug-in FocusFixer. Then I ran across DxO and got the full effect of "instantaneous." Suddenly glacially-slow-but-effective became much less attractive than instantaneous-and-effective. A temporary "hack" might be to alter the EXIF data in a file, persuading DxO that the "taking" lens was a
supported lens, but that's pretty drastic and introduces a possibility (however slight) of file corruption.
DxO apparently also believes that the EXIF block is in a hard-coded location, making it difficult or impossible to use if a program such as Photo Mechanic has relocated the EXIF block. In doing so it updates the pointer to the EXIF block, leaving the data accessible to any tool that looks for the pointer. But DxO apparently does not -- and it should. What a shame. (To date they have not been responsive to queries about this.)
To return to the 24-120...Nikon has had some considerable successes lately -- the 14-24, the 24-70, and per a friend who is using the new 16-35, that one is also remarkably good (if you can get a good copy). I'll hope the 24-120 rises to that level of quality, the current samples notwithstanding.
