As has already been noted, {OS X} 10.4.4 now supports non-US EOS 350D cameras: I’ve confirmed the European variant, and TK has commented that the Japanese model is also supported.
Greg Tebbut sent me an extract of the Raw.plist file, which shows that simple name based aliasing of cameras has now been addressed:
<key>Canon-EOS Kiss Digital N</key> <string>Canon-EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT</string> <key>Canon-EOS 350D DIGITAL</key> <string>Canon-EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT</string> <key>Canon-EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT</key>
So that’s good news for the future, but what about the decoding ? I haven’t tried to perform a quality analysis on the various raw decoders on the market, but I have tried adding IPTC metadata using Phil Harvey’s ExifTool (version 5.94) and the results are not promising. After adding IPTC:By-line and IPTC:City, Photoshop Elements 3, Canon’s DPP and Adobe’s Lightroom all decoded the file image correctly. Only Elements 3 paid any attention to my tags, but that’s not surprising as DPP never looked at them before, and IPTC support is one of the hot topics of the Lightroom Beta 1.
{Apple}’s Preview simply shows a black screen, just as it did under 10.4.3 with the modified Raw.plist, so I assume from this that {Apple} have a position based decoder albeit updated with exceptions for the various locale firmware changes. Obviously, I have no access to the source code and so could be way off the mark here, but if they don’t have a full parser for the data structure then future camera firmware updates could be an issue, as already noted under 10.4.3 by Michael Reichmann in this non-review of Aperture:
“For example, I currently use a Canon 1Ds MKII, a Canon 5D and a Phase One P25 medium format back. Only the MKII is supported, but I found that files shot since I updated the camera’s firmware in late November ’05 are not. Strange.”