I think we all need to be aware that Nikon is only the most current offender. All who are citing this as a reason to hug your Canons should study history a bit... Don't get me wrong, I think it was a rediculous decision on Nikon's part which I hope will be reversed, but the truth is that this is an INDUSTRY problem, not a NIKON issue. By treating it as a Nikon issue we'll never get to the root of the problem.
Quoting a DP Review interview with Dave Coffin (developer of dcraw):
A firestorm of controversy recently erupted when Thomas Knoll of Adobe accused Nikon of encrypting the white balance data in the D2X and D2Hs cameras, thus preventing Adobe from fully supporting these cameras.
I cracked this encryption on April 15, and updated dcraw.c and parse.c on April 17. So "dcraw -w" now works correctly with all Nikon cameras.
This is not a new problem. Phase One, Sony, Foveon, and Canon all apply some form of encryption to their RAW files. Dcraw decodes them all -- you can easily find decryption code by searching for the ^ operator.
Compression is not encryption. Phase One and Sony do encryption only. Kodak does compression only. Canon, Nikon, and Foveon compress the image data and encrypt some of the metadata.
This is a serious issue which needs to be addressed in a realistic manner. If you have a stake in this, and want to support realistic measures to correct it, please check out the OpenRaw Effort.
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