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PEF or DNG - which RAW format do you prefer?

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Holger Bargen

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Dear all,

Most time I shoot RAW - I did this with my K10D and I do it with my K5. With the K10D it was even more necessary as JPGs were not so good with this camera - but I like the higher contrast range and the greater posibillites for post-processing with RAW files also with my K5.

Many years I used the PEF format. For a while it seems as if this format would die and no longer be supported by Pentax - but now the new cameras still offer this format.

I switched to DNG during that time of unclear future of PEF - but now I ask myself, if it would be good to go back to PEF.

Does any of these formats have advantages or disadvantages compared to the other one that would make it important to select one of them?

What RAW Format do you use?

Best regards

Holger
 
DNG, so I can use lightroom with them.
 
Personally, I prefer DNG, I prefer not having the "sidecar" file, & I like the fact as an open source format it is more likely to be supported into the future. As I use Lightroom as my primary post processing tool I find this works well... except I also have a Fuji XE-1, and although Adobe have improved their rendering of RAF files from the X-Trans sensor its still not perfect, so I leave these files as "RAF" (Fuji RAW) for the time being, but as soon as Adobe get the processing better, or I work out how to tweak it properly, I'm not converting these to DNG (based on the belief that the DNG conversion of a RAF file may loose some of the Fuji quality).

But for Pentax, especially as the camera produces DNG in camera, I can't see any advantage of using PEF.

Just a personal preference :-)

Stephen
 
ahblur said:
PEF due to its file size.
Click to expand...
For all Pentax DSLR models using the PRIME II hardware graphics engine and newer, which started with the K-7 IIRC, Pentax have used loss-less compression for DNG files just as they do for PEF files making both raw formats as output by the camera roughly the same size.

Regards, GordonBGood
 
Holger Bargen said:
I switched to DNG during that time of unclear future of PEF - but now I ask myself, if it would be good to go back to PEF.

Does any of these formats have advantages or disadvantages compared to the other one that would make it important to select one of them?

What RAW Format do you use?
Click to expand...
I've used DNG, initially by conversion, since October 2005. I've used it in-camera since Pentax started to use lossless compression.

More than you ever wanted to know about DNG !

Benefits of DNG

DNG is the ONLY archival raw file format
 
DNG, since it first became available.
 
DNG.

I still have PEF files from my *.istD but I switched to DNG because my software hadn't caught up with the K10D (which I got the day it shipped) and never switched back. I'm not sure any software out there will read a PEF from a camera that it won't read a DNG from.

Having played a bit with some stuff to read metadata TIFF, PEF and DNG are all very closely related.
 
PEF can be converted to DNG, never the other way around. Not all software supports DNG (which makes me wonder how "open" that standard really is...), so it's a no-brainer for me to continue to use PEF.
 
James O'Neill said:
DNG.

I still have PEF files from my *.istD but I switched to DNG because my software hadn't caught up with the K10D (which I got the day it shipped) and never switched back. I'm not sure any software out there will read a PEF from a camera that it won't read a DNG from.

Having played a bit with some stuff to read metadata TIFF, PEF and DNG are all very closely related.
Click to expand...
For interest: DNG's relationship to standards

A simplified version of relationships between file formats:

TIFF has been owned by Adobe since the 1990s. PEF uses a lot of the structure of TIFF, as do many other raw file formats.

Adobe offered TIFF to ISO for use in the development of ISO 12234-2, (TIFF/EP), the only ISO standard raw file format (among other things). This had inadequate metadata. But NEF is/was based on TIFF/EP.

Adobe based DNG on TIFF/EP, but added lots more metadata, and they have kept adding more over the various versions. They have offered DNG to ISO (TC 42, WG 18) for their revision of TIFF/EP. This revision has been "lost" in ISO for years! My contacts are sworn to secrecy and won't give me an update.

Adobe devised CinemaDNG as a raw file format for video. It uses DNG for each frame.
 
Leandros S said:
PEF can be converted to DNG, never the other way around. Not all software supports DNG (which makes me wonder how "open" that standard really is...), so it's a no-brainer for me to continue to use PEF..
Click to expand...
I've used DNG since October 2004. I've never had cause to regret it.

As a de-facto (not de-jure) standard it is open. But that doesn't force all software developers to implement it fully, if at all. Some don't - you'll have to find out from them why not.

(There is an ISO standard raw file format, ISO 12234-2, TIFF/EP. How many software products support that directly? There is no compulsion. DNG is based on TIFF/EP).
 
GordonBGood said:
ahblur said:
PEF due to its file size.
Click to expand...
For all Pentax DSLR models using the PRIME II hardware graphics engine and newer, which started with the K-7 IIRC, Pentax have used loss-less compression for DNG files just as they do for PEF files making both raw formats as output by the camera roughly the same size.

Regards, GordonBGood
Click to expand...
Thanks for information. Then PEF was for my K10. I will try DNG with next camera.
 
It is quite amazing how often this question is asked. I don't believe it makes any difference which RAW format you decide to use. Maybe you should try taking several similar shots using both formats...see if you can detect a difference...then choose!
--
Steve A. Kleinheider
 
pseudobreccia said:
It is quite amazing how often this question is asked. I don't believe it makes any difference which RAW format you decide to use. Maybe you should try taking several similar shots using both formats...see if you can detect a difference...then choose!
Click to expand...
Here is an example of a difference: see how many non-Pentax software products currently support K-3 PEFs, and how many already support K-3 DNGs. Plenty of the latter, few if any of the former.

The reason to choose one over the other typically isn't to do with image quality once software supports both. It is to do with various other factors, including software support and workflow factors.
 
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