K10 PEF's or DNG's

Hi everone i was just wondering what people prefer PEF's or DNG's.Up until now i've only used PEF's but after speaking to a couple of people who own a k20 say they are getting about 22meg per DNG.

The k10 only gives me about 16meg per DNG as opposed to using a PEF which gives about 10-12meg per PEF.Also am i right in thinking that DNG's are from adobe which begs the question if i shoot in DNG and in the future some other software comes out that is not adobe am i left with a load of files i can't use.All replies welcome

On my K10D I use .pef and they are average around 11mb.

My new Samsung GX20 only supports .dng and those are 23mb each I've had to buy some additional memory cards!

DNG was invented by Adobe but is supported by many programs, not just Adobe ones. In fact it's supposed to be universally supported. DNG is short for "digital negative".

PEF takes up less room on your memory card and can be converted to DNG by Adobe DNG Converter. The losslessly compressed version of DNG is even smaller than PEF.

I shoot PEF then convert to Compressed DNG.

I also wondered if there would be any difference in quality with one being twice the size of the other.

Adobe DNG is an "open standard" and should be supported for a very long time to come.
Pentax PEF files are smaller - they are compressed (losslessly) - whereas DNGs from the camera are larger.
If you want the portability of DNG, and a better compression too you can run the PEFs through Adobe's stand alone DNG converter - this will produce very compact DNG files.

Before you do this, check what your current RAW conversion software supports (most supports DNG).

EDIT: No difference in quality at all. All compression on Pentax PEF files is lossless (ie nothing thrown away).

Matt

Cheers pete

Is there any current RAW software that doesn't support .pef anyway? I know .dng is an adobe format, but Lightroom / Photoshop happily open .pef files, as does everything else I've used.

The only compatibility issue I've had is with the DNG files from the GX20 and Picasa ....

I would use .pef on the GX20 if it was an option.

No, there's no difference in image quality. One is just more space-efficient than the other.

Continuous shooting mode on the K10D works more efficiently with DNG (you get an extra shot in the buffer iirc), but that's about the only real advantage to shooting DNG. Otherwise just convert to DNG afterwards if you like.

Like Iceblinker said, there is no difference in image quality.
If you both open them in photoshop you can see the amount of raw data and they are both the same. The strange thing is that the data make from PEF always stays more compresable.

In my view, the main reason for going to DNG relates to metadata (IPTC and XMP). If you choose to add keywords, labels, captions etc to a PEF file, a sidecar file has to be created to hold that information. If you share or move these files, you have to remember to move the sidecar file too. The DNG file on the other hand is designed to hold metadata without sidecars.

I use PEF RAW format, they work just fine with my preferred converter, Capture One 4 Pro.

PEF also holds the metadata even JPG does that.
So I'm sorry but I don't see your point, LeBleu.

I prefer PEF, it is exclusive to Pentax. What I am saying, is that you should use your camera's RAW format not DNG. There will come a time when the companies will drop their RAW formats and DNG will be the standard. Most editing software now recognizes PEF.

Is it worth my while using PEF when at an airshow for example then converting to DNG or should I stick to DNG? I only say that as I do tend to come home with a few images on my cards

I haven't used PEF before but I may give it a try especially as there is no loss in quality during the conversion process, I've already got the DNG converter installed on the PC.

Hi Stefan,

Yes it does! But in a separate file, commonly called a sidecar. The name of the file is the same as the PEF file, but has an xmp extension.

I use Idimager to create metadata in my images. If my image is a PEF, and I synchronize (write) my metadata back to the image file, the metadata is saved in an xmp file in the same folder as the PEF. If the image is a DNG, the metadata is written directly into reserved space in the DNG file format.

JPG files also have reserved space in their file format to store metadata. As far as I know, no RAW format other than DNG reserves space in its file design to store metadata in the image files. True for PEF, CR2 and NEF I know from personal experience...

ps. Hmmm Could you may be referring to exif information? True. PEF format does indeed store exif information - The metadata I was referring to was extended metadata - eg my name, copyright, keywords etc...

Dick