The file extension is .DNG, not "DGN". The Adobe Digital Negative standard is documented here: http://www.adobe.com/products/dng/?promoid=DTEHA
A DNG file is indeed a native raw file written to a publicly disclosed standard. There are many advantages to the Digital Negative standard, most of which are small in practical significance at the present time but have a great deal of future value. The primary benefit for the present is that for some native raw file formats, DNG represents a significant savings in disk space as it includes lossless compression of the sensor data. Also, if you are using Adobe tools (Camera Raw or Lightroom) to work with raw files, DNG files can contain additional data such as your processing settings, appended metadata, etc, where native raw files are considered as read-only so this sort of data must be stored elsewhere (usually in file-name matching .XMP files or embedded in the image processing engine's database, etc.). I convert all my raw files to DNG and have been doing so since 2005ish. It's saved a couple hundred gigabytes of archive storage space. -- Godfrey godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.