Thursday, March 31, 2011

Dirty Rat Bastards

Samsung is playing dirty with the metadata of its NX10 camera. While other manufacturers like Nikon and Sony encrypt colour balance information in RAW images (presumably to prevent 3rd party RAW converters from using this information), Samsung has taken this to another level with the NX10 (and various other recent models):

The difference is that the stored information is actually usable, but is changed just a little bit by adding small, random encrypted amounts to the stored values. The effect would be that the images wouldn't be as good from 3rd party utilities using this information.

Nasty.

But the next version of ExifTool (8.54) will remove this obfuscation from the stored values.

Chalk up one for the good guys.