Digital BW, The Print

On Apr 25, 2005, at 2:32 PM, Stephen Kobrin wrote:

>
>
> Richard,
>
> I don't want a raw converter for nothing.  I have CS and it contains
> the camera raw program.  My gripe, which may or may not be
> reasonable, is not maintaining some sort of backward compatability. I
> am not sure that it is fair to require the upgrade to get CS, which I
> am happy with, to work with a new camera.  Scam may have been a bit
> strong.  But, I think my point is reasonable.

Steven,

Very few vendors "backport" support like this - it's normal to add 
support for new hardware to the latest version of an app, but not to go 
back and re-engineer support for new hardware in discontinued versions. 
It's just common industry practice, nice or not - frankly I don't find 
the upgrade cost unreasonable (and CS still does everything, and more, 
that it did when you bought it - they didn't promise to support the XT, 
or to continually support new cameras ad infinitum). If there were no 
substantial differences - if CS2 had a virtually identical version of 
Camera RAW other than support for new hardware, I'd understand the 
upset. But it's a very substantial upgrade and their asking price - let 
alone the general price of the product - is quite fair IMHO.

Anyhow, the suggestion to use the forthcoming update of DNG Converter 
to convert your XT files to DNG, and then process those in CS, is a 
great one and shows the benefit of having a standard RAW format 
perfectly. As soon as the updated DNG Converter is out with XT support 
you can batch convert your raw files to DNG, and those will open fine 
in CS.

-R