How Fast Will Your New Camera’s RAW Files be Supported?

I was in a recent DALPUG user group meeting and the topic of Lightroom vs. Aperture came up. Specifically, someone mentioned that they were a bit tired of how slowly Aperture released updates to support the RAW files of new DSLRs from Canon, Nikon, etc.

I’ve always generally been okay with how fast Ligthroom supported new cameras, but the discussion got me thinking about how fast both these tools support new cameras.

The following are the results of my research. You can scroll to the bottom of the post for a bit more information on how I collected the data. As you can see, it isn’t exhaustive, but it is composed of over 30 models, primarily from Canon, Nikon and Sony.

While this may not guarantee how fast Lightroom and Aperture will support the RAW files from your new camera in the future, it is interesting to see how fast they’ve done so in the past.

A few interesting things to note:

Lightroom is faster (yah!), but that the gap isn’t huge.
The only exception to the previous point is in support of newer Sony models. At the time of this post, Aperture isn’t supporting a single one of the 6 Sony DSLRs released in 2009 that I used to compile these charts.
Nikon is generally supported a bit faster than Canon.

A Look at the Charts

All charts show the time, in days, needed to support the RAW files for a particular camera model. These are measured between a camera’s announcement date and the date Lightroom/Aperture released an update supporting the model.
General Chart

Nikon Support
Canon Support

Aperture Support

Lightroom Support

Data Sources & Info

Camera Announcement Dates were pulled from press releases and Wikipedia. Announcement dates were used because the data was more reliably accessible than the dates that the cameras were actually available for purchase.

Lightroom/Aperture release dates were based on Apple tech notes and Lightroom release notes.

Sample Sizes:

Canon: 9

Nikon: 9

Sony: 7

Olympus: 1

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Tags: News, raw

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 8:14 pm and is filed under Lightroom, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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About the Author: Brian Reyman
Contact Brian

Brian lives and breathes Adobe products and loves using pretty much all of them. He is an Adobe Community Professional for Lightroom and an Adobe Certified Expert in Lightroom. Brian is also Manager for the Denver Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop User Group.

When not shooting and using Lightroom (or other Adobe products), Brian is an IT professional living in Denver, Colorado.

John

Lightroom added 7D support prematurely to the production version of 2.5 (as did ACR 5.5), which skews your numbers. Everything was orange and because it wasn't the official support there were no profiles to correct for this until 2.6 was released. I'd rather wait for proper support than to be their guinea pigs for betas. Adobe, if you are reading this, keep the beta stuff in Adobe Labs from now on. :-(
Daniel Plainview

And as long as Aperture doesn't support dng, if you shoot Leica cameras, you'll never be supported
John Smith

But Aperture _does_ support DNG. It has for over 2 years.
Brian

Daniel-

Apple's web site seems to indicate that it is possible in some cases:
http://www.apple.com/aperture/specs/raw.html

I've never tried importing camera-generated DNG files in Aperture, though, so I'm not the definitive source there...
JasonP

A waiting period of 2 or 3 months may seem like a long time, but when you look at it realistically, it's pretty much a non-issue. Just how many people are affected by it? Camera testers (who are a small group) and then after a camera becomes AVAILABLE, which could be as long as a few months after announcement, just the people that absolutely must buy the latest/greatest before anyone else.

By the time new cameras are widely available a fresh update from Apple or Adobe is usually out or only a couple weeks away.

Then again, you may not need it... just after the Canon 50D was announced, I had a chance to play with a pre-production version at a camera show. When I imported the pics into LR2 (then only a month or so old itself) the RAW files opened just fine. Maybe the pre-production was the clue? The Camera Raw update didn't come out for a while after that though.
Gene McCullagh

That's probably true, Jason. Unless, of course, you shoot Sony or a Panasonic LX3. Many Sony models still aren't supported in Aperture. The LX3 has only gotten support with the release of Aperture 3 and that's almost a year after that camera was widely available.

I think Brian is just pointing out that Adobe does a better job at getting on top of the RAW conversion issues.
Brian

Gene's exactly right. The point of the post is to show the numbers, not necessarily comment (too much) on if things take "too long" or not. Personally, I found the numbers interesting.

Also, note that in addition to the Sony/Panasonic issues, these are just averages. Some cameras are supported so quickly there is hardly any gap between release and having software support it. Others took several months (even after the actual date someone could purchase it).

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