Some of you remember my my strange hack for getting the LX1 working in Aperture.

A year later, and I still have to do that. This model has since been replaced with the Panasonic DMC-LX2 (a.k.a. Leica D-LUX 3) which on paper sounds like this same trick should work for the RAW files. I don’t know, so I haven’t tried but this Flickr thread made me think.

This is total B.S. Why do I have to resort to using an Adobe product to get this to work at all?

[Why Apple should support this after the jump]

The case for supporting Panasonic/Leica

First of all, Leica owners are freaks. On the scale of rabid, they sit way past Macintosh users. These are exactly the sort of people you don’t want to piss off.

Second, Panasonic introduced the L1, this is a serious camera whose RAW files Apple don’t support. Leica has introduced a truly revolutionary (in a Leica retro way) M8 digital camera. I can imagine professional street photographers using this camera and Apple doesn’t support it.

Finally, with Canon quietly dropping RAW support from all their new compact cameras, Panasonic is one of the few vendors left that supports RAW. And Aperture is all about RAW. What do you think pros and enthusiasts (potential Aperture users) are going to be shooting when they’re not shooting their dSLR or scanning back medium format?