We asked camera companies why their RAW formats are all different and confusing

> If a manufacturer comes up with additional data that isn’t included in the DNG standard, the format is extensible enough that a camera manufacturer can throw it in there, anyway.

It sounds like DNG has so much variation that applications would still need to support different features from different manufacturers. I'm not sure it (DNG) will really solve interoperability problems. This issue smells like someone is accidentally playing politics without realizing it.

Kind of reminds me of the interoperability fallacy with XML. Just because my application and your application use XML, it doesn't mean that our applications are interoperable.

I suspect that a better approach would be a "RAW lite" format that supports a very narrow set of very common features; but otherwise let camera manufacturers keep their RAW files as they see fit.

Seems like DNG does behave like the RAW lite format you've just described: Everything common would be stored within the base DNG file, while everything "advanced" / more specific to a camera would be stored in additional metadata properties, which do not need to be parsed to still be able to process the base image. You can add support for these metadata on a case-by-case basis without breaking the original format, so you're not stuck re-implementing your whole raw parsing when a new camera is released as the base subset of DNG would still work.

Hey. I’m the guy quoted.

RAW is ultimately about sensor readings. As a developer, you just want to get things from there into a linear, known color space (XYZ in the DNG spec). So from that perspective, interoperability isn’t the issue.

How you process that data is another matter. Handling a traditional bayer pattern vs a quad-bayer vs Fujifilm’s x-trans pattern obviously requires different algorithms, but that’s all moot given DNG is just a container.