Just wanted to post that I am enjoying good results with DNG and UFRaw.
The UFRaw program can read the camera's white balance, and when I set camera's colour profile to "Color matrix" option, file colour profile to sRGB (embedded), I seem to be getting pretty good colours - somewhat different from the JPEG's produced by the camera itself, but nevertheless excellent. Moreover, when I export the image to GIMP (for applying possible lens distortion and unsharp mask) and then save as JPG, it seems all the pertinent EXIF info is carried over as well.
A few shots of Helsinki at fine summer night:
Here are a couple of colour comparison samples of shots I've taken recently.
DNG (UFRaw export to GIMP, lens distortion, unsharp mask and resize to sensible dimensions):
Corresponding camera produced JPEG (for colour comparison):
DNG (same as before, but also cropped)
Camera JPEG:
The greens are a tad bit bluer, and the camera JPEGs are slightly brighter overall, but it's hard to form an opinion which ones have "better" colour reproduction. Clearly the RAW shots have better quality artefact-wise, and colours are very good as well, even if they are slightly different than the ones in the camera's own JPEG's.
