OpenRAW

See the "About" section - Canon already HAS dropped support for D30. I doubt that Canon South Africa - probably a pure sales organization - is responsible for the development of Canon's RAW converter and therefore such assertions are completely immaterial. Even if all camera models were supported for an eternity (or two), there are other reasons why someone would prefer to operate on raw instead of converted data. Converted data always contains less information than raw data.

Remigius, "Converted data" and "raw data" are not necessarily incompatible. Neither does converted data necessarily contain less information that Raw data.

For example, DNG is intended to be Raw data - simply not camera-specific Raw data. If the DNG Converter can get at all the information, it will end up in the resultant DNG.

The single most important part of the Raw data is that from the sensors, combined with data describing the overall configuration of the sensors. At least with this, the image can be recovered, even if some of the metadata may not be there. And both the DCRAW initiative and DNG appear to be pretty good at preserving these vital parts.

(For example, for my camera, the DNG conversion, when the "no compression" option is used, contains a binary copy of the sensor data from the camera's original Raw format. That is still Raw by any plausible definition. DNG compression is lossless, of course).