OK, this should interesting to watch. Adobe has announced something called the Digital Negative Specification, which aims to unify the various RAW formats produced by digital SLR cameras and the like.
Although the idea itself is interesting from a conceptual point of view, it is a very obvious play by Adobe to break into digital photography in a big way. Adobe isn't much of a player in that field, besides Photoshop obviously (which pre-dates digital photography!). Adobe might be trying to "pull a Microsoft" here by getting the camera producers to support a format that will put Adobe into some position of power. Compare this to Microsoft's hold over the PC hardware platform specs.
At the same time, supporting a lot of RAW formats doesn't seem to be too much of a stretch for most Photo Management tools. Almost all of them support all common formats (Nikon, Olympus, various Canon flavours, etc.). Sure it might take a bit of extra effort, but since any (important) cameras supporting this format will be at least 6 months away. This because not a single real camera vendor (sorry, not counting HP as one at the moment) has pledged support and all of them have just announced new cameras in preparation for Photokina. This basically means that any real support is at least a product-cycle away. Add 18 months to 2 years for most pros to buy a new camera again and you're looking at supporting all the different RAW formats for at least another 2 to 3 years.
Still, in the long run it might be for the better. Especially if the format supports digital signatures for images as well, so the negative can be proven to be both the only "original" and owned by photography X.
Since I'm going to Photokina on friday, I'll have a chat with the Adobe guys to see what they are really up to. Expect a full Photokina report on saturday.
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