Finally loaded the Nikon add on. One hundred megs of crappola
Yeah, this seems common.
I bought my GF a Canon S90 and the only software Canon supply for RAW to 'other' conversion is a few hundred MB's worth of stuff one doesn't need.
Similar with my Pentax K200D.
There are converters which support many formats but most of them are not free, and some are quite pricey. However, I found a thing called
Faststone Image Viewer which seems to work well; it's a bit like ACDSEE in that one can use it to view one's photo albums.
Not sure if Photoshop Elements can read any RAW formats. I have Photoshop 7 which certainly can't. However, the biggest problem with ex-camera jpeg is the amount of compression; if one converts RAW to Jpeg (highest possible quality) then the result is very good - although the filesize is probably 50% of the Raw size, whereas the more compressed ex-camera Jpeg is probably 25% of the Raw size. If cameras allowed control over the degree of Jpeg compression, there would be a lot less need for Raw.