Here’s something that looks pretty promising. I haven’t used this myself, so I’m only relaying initial thoughts and passing on what someone else told me.

With the relase of consumer digital SLRs nearly everyone and their dog has one now. I suppose there are two side to this… One is that the “eliteness” of being in the digital SLR realm is somewhat lost but what will HOPEFULLY come, is the lowered cost of SLR lenses… (Yeah, I know supply and demand doesn’t work that way.)

Anyways, to get to the point, for those of you out there who don’t want to use the packaged software and don’t have Adobe Photoshop CS2 (earlier versions do not support the newer RAW formats), then FastStone has the answer for you. FastStone’s Image Viewer is a freeware program which will allow you to open your RAW formats like CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF and DNG.

Did I mention that it’s free?

Now, from what I’ve been told, compared to Canon’s own Digital Photo Pro, FastStone’s Image Viewer even renders the RAW images faster! With a little bit of set up, you can also configure the program to convert the RAW images to something compatible with your editing program of choice and send it over.

Definately worth a look-see I’d say.