Navigating the Makernote hell

Trying to enhance node-exif, my Exif library for node.js, I came across Makernotes which really do annoy me right now.

Makernotes are part of the Exif specification, a standard for storing information about an image inside the image file, especially used in JPEGs. Where Exif itself is well specified and documented, the Makernote part is everything but. The specification describes the Makernote as "a tag for manufacturers of Exif writers to record any desired information. The contents are up to the manufacturer, but this tag should not be used for any other than its intended purpose".

As you can imagine the part the contents are up to the manufacturer led to a lot of different specifications with most of them being proprietary. Hurray! Luckily most of the specifications have been reverse engineered by now, for example by Evan Hunter, and are available around the internet, no one seems to claim completeness, though.

As if the proprietary nature with missing specifications isn't enough the Makernotes bring a couple of other problems which I’m not going to elaborate on here. If you’re interested you can check the Exiv2 Makernote page for a start.

Anyway, after digging for information and writing some code to extract the Makernote data I now need to test if everything works and iron out some bugs. This is why I'm looking for pictures taken with cameras by the following manufacturers and hope you can help me out:

Agfa, Asahi, Canon, Casio, Contax, Epson, Fujifilm, Foveon, Kodak, Konica, Kyocera, Leica, Mamiya, Minolta, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, Ricoh, Samsung, Sigma, Sony.

If you own a camera by one of the manufacturers, know someone who does or simply have a picture taken with one of these cameras around I’d really appreciate if you can drop me a line and/or the picture on Twitter or GitHub. Thanks!