Preview on MacBook Pro says NEF format not supported

To follow up and close out this issue. First, again thanks to those that assisted and commented. Further investigation definitively proved that the issue was with the internal card reader. Acceptable behaviour was seen using an external card reader with the cards used above attached to one of the thunderbolt ports. Thereafter a session with Apple tech support confirmed my findings doing a number of tests under Safe Boot.

I just upgrade to Monterey 12.2.1 and thus far the issue looks to be solved. Previously problematic cards when inserted are recognized and mounted on the desktop in about 10-15 seconds far improved than the previous 1 minute to mount. Card data is also viewable thru Preview with no issues.

Hello again;

I did review those links and it didn't help as the post where quit old but it did give me and idea to try a few things. I tried storing the files as JPG which would be a real poor solution but still wanted to see what would happen. That solved nothing but I did notice something interesting in the next few steps. Oh by the way inserting a card from the D800 takes well over a minute to be recognized on the desktop and any attempts at opening an image will lead to a crashed machine. I've seen that Preview dies in activity monitor.

I then found an image card that was formatted with a D7000. When inserting the D7000 card it came up on the desktop very quickly and I could preview the images that were all D7000 NEF. I then used the card in the D800 shooting a JPG image and that worked as I could see the D800 subfolder and the image. Repeated for a NEF file. That worked. So now I believe the MacBook Pro cannot read cards formatted by a D800. That is still a major problem but it doesn't seem to be a file format issue.