"That has emphatically not been my experience with those programs. And I've been using (and updating) them for about nine years."
Well certainly you are the expert on DPP but you apparently have not used an early version of EOS Utility? 
@ebiggs1 wrote:"That has emphatically not been my experience with those programs. And I've been using (and updating) them for about nine years."
Well certainly you are the expert on DPP but you apparently have not used an early version of EOS Utility?
I can't imagine why that's apparent; it certainly isn't true. When I first started using DPP, I didn't even own a card reader, so I had to use EOS utility (and I think one or two other utilities that Canon doesn't support anymore) to upload my pictures.
My point was that you don't have to uninstall any of the Canon utilities in order to upgrade or replace older versions. I can't swear that the process has always worked as well as it does now, but it's been very smooth for several years. When we hear a user griping that his computer won't recognize his camera, etc., I'm convinced that it's almost always because the user doesn't have the latest version of the Canon software or because his operating system isn't up to date (or both).
That's not to say that the Canon utilities are perfect. Version 4 of DPP, for example, while it offers some useful new features, has a user interface that's almost cartoonishly unready for prime time, with hidden buttons, peculiar terminology (what do you think "save" means?), and a number of annoying bugs, some of them dangerous. (For example, some pictures stay highlighted when they shouldn't; then when you inadvertently delete them, you find that there's no "undelete".)
My favorite DPP bug goes back several years. Originally, neither DPP nor Zoombrowser had the ability to do rotations, but the "EOS Solution Disks" included a 3rd-party utility that did. Eventually DPP, at least, aquired a rotation capability, and the 3rd-party utility was dropped. A couple of years (and a few DPP updates) later, I found that when I tried to open JPEG files saved by the 3rd-party utility, DPP would often crash and have to be restarted. I reported this bug to Canon, who had someone contact me who promised to look into it. But nothing was ever done, and the bug remains. Occasionally I still encounter one of those old files, whereupon DPP will usually crash. I can't believe that bug would be hard to find (bugs that cause crashes usually aren't); and even if the 3rd-party JPEGs contain subtle formatting errors, no editor should crash on that account. Leaving the bug in DPP is what you might expect from some software developers (alas, I could name a few), but not from Canon.
But while there may be things about Canon's utilities that don't work as they should, their update mechanism isn't one of them. I've found it to be at least as reliable as that of any other software vendor.
Bob
Boston, Massachusetts USA
Hey man I ain't far behind you. And you perked my curiosity on DPP. I usually try it every so often just to make sure it isn't any better. There was a update I didn't have so I d/l and gave it another go.
After using it for awhile and starting to think, why don't I like this? It seems like it is doing pretty good. Than it strikes me. The main reason I don't like is, it isn't PS. No matter how much you do or can do with it, you wind up in PS. There is even a menu tab already there to take you to PS. If you have to go to PS in the end anyway, why start somewhere else?
Add the fact I prefer ACR's RAW conversion better than Canon's own. DPP is limited to jpg and tiff of course PS is not.
A person can do everthing you will ever need with Bridge inside PS and stay in one program. Better idea is LR and PS which is a seemless operation.
There is one part of DPP that I think is great. The Batch Process feature. Works well.
There is no right or wrong to this. It is just what you prefer. But I know of no pro outfit, and where I worked for 40 years, use DPP. They all use PS, so that also bears on my decission.
As for EOS Utility, they do indeed drop support for older cameras. For instance, it appears the last version of EOS Utility that officially supported my Rebel XTi was version 2.9. Maybe why we see so many posts here about the computer not recognizing my camera. They all say, it used to but now it doesn't.
Not to mention loss of OS support in Win and Mac.
Oh, well it's all good. 
@ebiggs1 wrote:Bob
Boston, Massachusetts USA
Hey man I ain't far behind you. And you perked my curiosity on DPP. I usually try it every so often just to make sure it isn't any better. There was a update I didn't have so I d/l and gave it another go.
After using it for awhile and starting to think, why don't I like this? It seems like it is doing pretty good. Than it strikes me. The main reason I don't like is, it isn't PS. No matter how much you do or can do with it, you wind up in PS. There is even a menu tab already there to take you to PS. If you have to go to PS in the end anyway, why start somewhere else?
Add the fact I prefer ACR's RAW conversion better than Canon's own. DPP is limited to jpg and tiff of course PS is not.
A person can do everthing you will ever need with Bridge inside PS and stay in one program. Better idea is LR and PS which is a seemless operation.
There is one part of DPP that I think is great. The Batch Process feature. Works well.
There is no right or wrong to this. It is just what you prefer. But I know of no pro outfit, and where I worked for 40 years, use DPP. They all use PS, so that also bears on my decission.
As for EOS Utility, they do indeed drop support for older cameras. For instance, it appears the last version of EOS Utility that officially supported my Rebel XTi was version 2.9. Maybe why we see so many posts here about the computer not recognizing my camera. They all say, it used to but now it doesn't.
Not to mention loss of OS support in Win and Mac.
Oh, well it's all good.
IMO, the best feature of DPP, which I don't believe is shared by PS and LR, is that all changes you make are stored as metadata in the original .CR2 file. There are no databases or "sidecar" files to limit how you can organize your workflow. Yeah, its output is limited to TIFF and JPEG, but I've never had occasion to need anything else.
DPP's batch processing feature is actually clumsier than it looks. When resizing files and preserving their aspect ratios, it imposes the same "long dimension" size on all the files being processed. So if, say, you want all the pictures to be the same height regardless of their width, you're out of luck. So I find myself converting one image at a time frustratingly often. (This behavior, BTW, is not documented, so it may not even be intentional. But it has survived through many version updates.)
Do we dare to hope that any of this forum's many moderators are reading these posts for anything beyond identifying contraband content and might occasionally route them to someone with software development responsibility? <sigh>
