Agreed 
Sometimes it seems like they only do it to make peoples lives difficult.
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The bulk of their customers just want JPEGs, including a fair number of professionals. People who understand the nuts and bolts of digital imaging are a small numberā¦ witness āISO sensitivityā in Nikon camera manuals, sure as hell didnāt write that to appease me.
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For me, the main problem is: Adobe still has a patent on DNG. The format is just āan openly published specificationā (from Adobeās web side today). If Adobe wants to, they may decide to make it closed source. If Adobe would remove the patent license, I would see it as open source. If and only ifā¦
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They probably couldnāt give a coherent reason if they tried. Outside of proprietary compression schemes, there doesnāt seem to be anything of value, so itās probably a case of corporate inertia and imagined dangers.
No, they are in fact trying to protect you from bad images 
I recommend reading the full PR piece from Nikon - itās hilarious.
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All my raw files from 2001-2013 have been converted to DNG. My raw files from 2014-2024 are still in the camera makers raw format.
Considering the compression gains that come with lossless JPEG XL DNGs, it will be hard justifying not converting them all to DNG once darktable supports it. My A7 III files sits uncompressed at 50 MB a piece. The camera does not support lossless compression. The space savings would be rather mad.
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Storage is cheap, my time spent taking photos is not. Your raw file is an artifact from your photography work, and should be treated and stored as such.
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One reason I do not convert my files to DNG is I want to know which camera brand the file came from. Also if it is a RAW file format I know it is a true RAW file whereas programs can produce a DNG that is not a RAW file and nothing more than a Tiff file in a DNG package. However, for unsupported file types converting to DNG is an easy work around. This allows me to still use my LR6 software with later model cameras.
My Pentax cameras offer DNG or PEF formats for RAW. Ultimately I learnt to stick with PEF so I knew it was the true RAW file and not an export from Lightroom.
So I would say no advantage in converting to DNG unless you have an unsupported camera and then it is a great solution.
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It took them years to make their own PDF reader reliable, and now itās bloatware. Thatās what actually steered me toward FOSS photography apps; I thought, āif Adobe canāt handle making a PDF reader, what chance is there that they can make a good photo editor?ā
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Iām much more interested in the the normalization of data than keeping artifacts. Itās not for nothing that some instituitions[1][2] adopt it for digital preservation.
That depends on how many photos you store. 
Keeping more disks spinning in my TrueNAS server is also a source of maintenance and electricity costs. But yes, perhaps Iāll arrange some cold storage for the originals.
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Sounds like a file management problem. Can be solved by keeping mosaiced raw filed in a separate parent directory.
Itās more a indicator of camera make than camera model. Also, metadata will tell? Depending on the file manager, perhaps it can even be shown as a column there.
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I have already mentioned this caveat emptor somewhere, but here goes again - although the pixel data can be recoded without issues in a DNG, there are rare cases where metadata (esp. proprietary MakerNotes) could become unusable (or parts of it lost).
IIRC, once you convert Sony raws to DNG, I donāt think exiv2 can currently access the Sony MakerNotesā¦
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Yes, am aware of this. Have not yet found that this has been a problem in practice though. *knock on wood*
Would love to know if thatās the case. At least theyāve documented them. I believe theyāre carried over to the DNG file by Adobre DNG Converter. But yeah, can the same MakerNotes be read by Exiv2 in a DNG?
I used to think the pros outweighed the cons. Now Iām on the fence, but JPEG XL compression might make me change my mind againā¦ Depending on the Exiv2 support for MakerNotes in DNG files, I guessā¦ 
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Thatās the big point. You all might hate DNG not being fully open but all raw file formats are even worse. Makernote tags vary between cameras, many tags can be read via exiftool but no chance what that really means for algorithms.
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DNG is a format that Iāve never liked to use, in the past, it only brought me problems with different software. I only take my photos as JPEG except for exceptions. That works quite well so far.
My hope is, however, to circumvent the limitations of the old file format, that one day not so far in the future camera manufacturer will replace it with JPEG XL. This would be a huge advance to simplify the entire processing workflow from camera to image output and archiving. I do not think that JPEG XL should replace camera-specialized RAW formats, who should use them further. For normal users, however, JPEG XL offers many advantages as well as more advanced users. Just a single file format with yet strongly expanded possibilities that was actually developed for photos and did not take the way through usual video compression.
That was not what I was trying to say. DNG 1.7 supports lossless compression of mosaiced raw data using JPEG XL.
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Beware that JPEG XL suffers from the same problem as DNG. While the spec and feature set is very rich and promising, thatās a blessing in disguise - it is never guaranteed any implementation of it will cover all of the features all the time, which again leads to incompatibilities and end user frustration. Heck, TIFF has been around for decades, and a lot of software still doesnāt support 16bpp, (let alone float), Lab, etc. Thatās why JPEG is still so prevalent - itās relatively simple, there are less things to go wrong.
All of it circling back to: developers, developers, developersā¦ A file format/codec spec (however wonderful it sounds) is worthless w/o wide software adoption.
I know the DNG can work internally with JPEG XL. But JPEG XL has been developed as its own file format. And here I see enormous potential that the constant conversion between file formats for normal to professional users has an end, as it can access strongly expanded image information despite all. I see it in workflow similar to media-neutral work as in publishing. At the end, what you do with it is decided 
JPEG XL was also already in the evulation for standardized archiving. Due to the withdrawal of well-known companies to support the format, there was of course uncertainty here. But that could change again.
Yeah, youāre right. But with the already available libraries and modules of the JPEG Group, a solid framework for the implementation and support of unmoved image material for the work of photographers is already available. And free to use it. I do not want to turn the discussion too much into the JPEG XL format, but in my understanding of this development, it has enormous advantages that could be used to circumvent existing problems, perhaps should
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I can hear him my head while reading this 
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Oh, thereās one aspect of camera raw vs. DNG not yet discussed - lens correction. In my investigation of the new Nikon parameters for the Z lenses, the parameters extracted from the NEFs are not the same as the ones in a DNG created with Adobeās DNG converter. This may be due to differences in the correction domain driving different polynomials, but theyāre still different. So, if you want to use the manufacturerās recommendations for lens correction, there may be a disconnect with DNGā¦
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