Michael's DNG comment

[sandymc]

So am I correct in thinking that at the point of release (assuming Fuji RAW files had been written in DNG format) that the converters, ACR, etc would not have been able to render the file unless it had been converted into Linear DNG, and that if so, then you would still require advanced algorithms to do the conversion into Linear DNG. Is Linear DNG essentially just a DNG wrapper around a TIF file?

I'd think that raw converters written for the full DNG spec (which means LR and ACR, nobody else does) would have been able to render an X-Trans file. However, it might not have been a very good rendering; I don't know what's on the inside of the LR/ACR converter, but it would not surprise me if it had highly optimized code for well known patterns (e.g., Bayer), but fell back to something simplistic (like nearest neighbor) for an unknown pattern.

Linear raw as a wrapper round a TIF file? That's a religious question

Sandy

[madmanchan]

The DNG spec basically says fairly little about the actual rendering of the image.  It's more about the container (file structure of the image) and some of the basic tags needed to describe what the data means.  For example, the spec says nothing about how mosaic data should be interpolated.  Raw converters are free to do whatever type of interpolation they feel is best for a particular mosaic pattern, and if some converters have more sophisticated methods -- well, good for them!