Open source cameras

It is interesting to watch development of the camera world. The famous Kodak missed the digital train and gone. Pentax is shrinking. Canon and Nikon dominate the digital world, especially in professional / advanced cameras but both companies have very small presence in new area, mirrorless cameras. This segment is fairly small and crowded  with competitors, including electronic giants such as Samsung. It is a new field, with many things happening. Samsung just made the software behind their mirrorless cameras NX2000 and NX300 public, so anyone with a proper knowledge can improve or tweak it. Compare this situation to the DSLR world where Canon used to handicap the entry-level models by software. The software was hacked at some point. Or another hack that improved Panasonic video recoding?

Now Samsung is jumping on open source train. Good on them! I use OpenOffice and GIMP at home. Wikipedia content is created by public. I know people donated(?) hundreds images to the Wikipedia. Potentially it might be a win-win situation for camera makers and the users. The camera companies can save on software development, and photographers may have a choice of different firmware. Many current CSC / mirrorless models have very short life span before being replaced with the next model. The companies are not interested in software improvement for old models but the public does. Things like a noise reduction or white balance can be improved, the image correction can be added, and so on. For example, now Fujifilm claims to have an algorithm to work around the diffraction. Obviously, there are limits of what can be done, but this approach may extend an average camera life for some people. It would not work for all people, that's for sure, but it might work for active part of the population. It also comes with the responsibility: do it on your own risk.

Kudos to Samsung for breaking the rules.