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underlines | 5 months ago

Reading the title, I thought: finally someone rooted/jailbroke sony cameras.

On Canon you can run Magic Lantern, an extensive mod that adds many features to Canon cameras.

Even Samsung N1 had SD Card loadable mods before they moved away from the camera market.

Rooting sony seems impossible, I never saw someone Working on it Since their Fullframe lineup launched.

discuss

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ge0rg|5 months ago

The last two generations of Samsung NX cameras were built around Tizen Linux, and it was (and still is) easy to get a root shell on them. They still make great photos and you still can buy them used for a good price.

NX300/NX30/NX2000 had a read-only rootfs, but for NX500 and NX1 there was a persistent mod that extended camera functionality with a menu, and you can actually SSH into them and rsync your photos... while shooting!

Background: I've recently taken over maintenance of the NX-KS mod at https://github.com/ge0rg/nx-ks-mod

dvdkon|5 months ago

Great to see another Samsung NX hacker in the wild! I'm in the process of developing a mod for my NX300 and NX30 (with the NX2000 likely compatible). It doesn't do anything yet, but I've got a lot of work done on hooking ARM code [0] and compiling modern C++ for the cameras.

Personally I think the NX300/30/2000 are the most hackable cameras ever made, even compared to the NX1/500. The read-only rootfs isn't really a barrier, since the software runs a shell script from the SD card on boot (or rather resume from hibernation, it's a pretty clever system). And unlike the newer models, they don't have an RTOS coprocessor, so everything is handled in the easier-to-modify Linux code. It's not a design decision I would have made, but it makes in-depths mods easier.

The older cameras are also easy to unbrick, since the bootloader files used for firmware flashing without a working OS were released in the FLOSS code dump. The availability of some C headers in that dump is the cherry on top.

I'll admit I'd still rather have an NX500, I just bought the NX300 because I'm cheap :)

[0]: https://gitlab.com/dvdkon/pahil

underlines|5 months ago

I had the NX1 with all the premium lenses and some photos still seem to be better than what my Sony A7-M4 shoots. But no 10bit 4:2:2 for video and no real flat profile was a bummer. I loved the persistent mod though. Sold all NX1 gear years ago, moved to a Sony A7-M3 and then A7-M4. Full Frame has some great benefits.

kuschku|5 months ago

> Rooting sony seems impossible, I never saw someone Working on it Since their Fullframe lineup launched.

On some cameras, including the older firmwares for the current cameras, https://github.com/ma1co/Sony-PMCA-RE gives you a root shell.

underlines|5 months ago

Yes, aware of that, and nothing recent works with it, the last progress sadly was years ago.

I guess DMCA/Sony Lawyers and the relatively low market share for expensive cameras is the main reason why a PlayStation, an iPhone or a Nintendo Jailbreak is more appealing to reverse engineers than a Sony Camera Jailbreak.