Well, you may have been lurking around, waiting patiently for our followup and a good look at some files from the sweet little E-P1.  Out of self-defense, I'm going to tell you the story of shooting RAW with the Olympus...  it ain't a pretty picture, I'll warn you. 

First, as you'd expect with a new camera, the RAW files aren't supported by Adobe Camera RAW.  (When oh WHEN will these manufacturers start offering DNG as a shooting option?)  However, in the spirit of the faceoff we're trying for, the Nikon D5000 and the Canon Digital Rebel Xti are supported right now.  Fine, it's only a matter of time, but I'm just sayin...   

So we go to the Olympus Support site.  Go to the Downloads section, and select the Olympus Pen Digital menu and that should take you to a package that can work with the files, right?  Wrong.  Nada.   

On the sidebar, looking like an ad, is a link to the Olympus Master 2 software.  OK, fine, we click, we download, we hope for the best.  

Sorry, here's where I get pissy.  I download this, install it, and still am not sure if it even supports the camera.  I start it up, and it asks me if I want to check for updates.  Of course I do, figuring how could it need an update, I just downloaded it from the Olympus site.  Well, now, it DOES find an update, and I download that...  it's around 140MB.  (...bless you FIOS).  After that download and install...  I get to start the thing up.

I'm running a fairly conservative system, but I routinely throw some pretty big files around.  It's a 2Ghz Intel Mac with 2GB RAM.  Nothing too hot, but it works fine.  This software is the absolute slowest thing I've seen in recent memory.  It's so slow...  ("how SLOW is it?")  ...it's so slow I'm thinking, OK, these files aren't supported, only to go get my coffee and come back to find that we have some thumbnails.  I start working on the files and it's painful.  Long, excruciating story short, the software is simply unusable.  Really, in this day and age, an embarrassment. 

Sorry for the rant, but here's the thing.  It is one thing if the manufacturer can build software that is better, faster, higher quality than the many options out there- mainly Adobe's Camera RAW and Lighroom, but also Aperture, PhaseOne, and many more.  But the continued strategy of compelling the customer to using their RAW file format with their RAW processor is just plain dumb.  If you can't build a file and a processor that works, then offer us one that does.  DNG. If they took all that money they used to develop this software that doesn't work, and put it into developing a DNG shooting option, they'd have a whole lot of money left over.

This has got me back on the DNG support bandwagon, and you're going to see more posts with more information about DNG coming real soon.  And you can blame Olympus...  but in the meantime, go sign my petition