Good news for digital photographers

WARNING: Geek Alert

If you own a digital camera, you may have noticed the only way to get pictures off it are as jpeg files. (This isn’t true for all cameras, but it is for quite a few, such as Kodak and Nikon.) This is Ok for your garden-variety snapshot, but if you need to do any advanced editing, it’s a problem, since jpegs use a “lossy” compression algorithm–you really can’t edit them.

The problem has been that some part of the uncompressed picture was encrypted. Well, that may not be a problem any longer. c|net’s news.comreports that Dave Coffin has succeeded in downloading the uncompressed images. This is a major breakthrough for amateur digital photographers, since until now they have pretty much been at the mercy of the manufacturers, who of course were usually more than happy to gouge them for the necessary software. (An exception has been Canon, who get a big kudos for not being a greedy bunch of corporate so-and-sos.)

You can get a Windows version of the software here, but you might want to hurry. Mr. Coffin may well be in violation of the DMCA *spit*, and since he’s tweaking some large corporate interests, well, you can figure out for yourself what might happen.

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