Significant effort goes into even "minor" dot releases for Camera Raw. Camera support is added, bugs are fixed, and sometimes features are added & improved. Not only does the engineering need to be completed, but it also needs to be tested -- not just on the platform you happen to use at home or in your studio, but on ALL platforms that we support officially and all their variants (e.g., Mac, Windows, XP, Vista, Tiger, Leopard, 32-bit, 64-bit, PowerPC, Intel, etc.) ... and when there are UI changes/additions, not just the language you happen to read, but ALL the languages supported. If we made a dot release every time a new camera shipped, then we'd have dozens of releases every year ... with the unfortunate consequence that we'd have to ignore all of your feature requests since we'd have no time to implement them. As such, the camera makers have their own release schedule, and Adobe has its own release schedule. These schedules operate largely independent of each other; sometimes releases line up nicely, sometimes they don't. For example, Camera Raw 5.2 (a fairly big update) happened to come out at the end of November 2008. At the time, Adobe had no idea that the Nikon D3X would be announced at the beginning of December. (Yeah there were rumors but then again there have been rumors of a Canon EOS 3D and an Epson 3900 for as long as I can remember ...) So when the D3X shipped in mid December, Adobe had just completed a release cycle and was not in the position of turning around another release immediately. The unfortunate result was that eager early adopters of the D3X had to wait for support from Camera Raw & LR (5.3 and 2.3, respectively). One way around this scheduling problem (a solution that has proven quite effective in this regard) is for the camera maker to write in-camera DNG files. For example, the Casio EX-FH20 writes DNG files. The day the camera shipped, the EX-FH20 raw files were immediately readable in Camera Raw (going back to version 2.4 with Photoshop CS). Happily, Adobe and Casio did not need to coordinate their schedules to make this happen, and customers of the EX-FH20 did not have to wait a single day to get raw processing support in Camera Raw. I've said it before, and I know it's not popular, but my practical recommendation is that if you want to use new camera X with third-party software Y immediately after buying camera X, you should check before purchasing the camera that the two will work together from the get-go. If Y happens to be Camera Raw / Lightroom, you are welcome to ask here in the forums. If you don't ask, you should be prepared to wait. Eric
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