Unfortunately, like any business, Adobe turned out to be somewhat protective and guarded in their business plan and so DNG wasn't universally accepted by makers of hardware and software. You can't really blame Adobe.They are in business to make a profit.
To be fair, most camera manufacturers have actively chosen to use (and promote) their own proprietary Raw formats, rather than DNG, and not because Adobe have put them off in some way - quite the reverse, AFAICT. Pentax for one example,
have offered DNG as an alternative to PEF for several years, without apparent difficulty.
But it is in Nikon, Canon etc's interest to lock users into specific software which supports brand-specific proprietary functions. Probably, Pentax were not in the commercial position of dominance where that was any possibility, so sought to realise a different unique-selling-point.
And in fact that has paid off: new Pentax cameras are
already supported by those means (in a generic manner) long before the software update which explicitly supports them, and even long before the release of the relevant DNG converter from Adobe too.
If (for example) Nikon can persuade a camera owner to commit to a NEF-specific workflow - it raises the difficulty bar for switching brand. So Nikon will seek to promote the supposedly unique, claimed advantages of that, and even to encrypt or protect it to the extent they can commercially get away with. It is not in Nikon's (and most other manufacturers') interest to cooperate fully on the basis - which Adobe CAN seek to propose, lacking any skin in the game - that camera raw formats should be treatable as in effect, non-proprietary and interchangeable.
RP
