The KDC file (.kdc)

KDC is the file format of Kodak's consumer digital cameras. It first appeared on the DC series of the mid-1990s: the DC40 (1995), the DC50 with its 768 × 512 sensor and PC card slot, and the 1.2-megapixel DC120 (1997).

Later, Kodak used the same extension for the raw files of Kodak's more advanced compacts and bridge cameras, such as the P880 and the EasyShare Z1015 IS. Those KDC files hold raw sensor data: readings under red, green and blue filters that software must demosaic, white-balance and tone-map. The US National Archives describes KDC as a format of Kodak's DC- and P-series cameras that can hold either bitmap images or camera raw data.

Kodak's professional DCS cameras used a different raw format, DCR, and the DC25 had its own K25 format.

Kodak's camera software of the 1990s and 2000s is long out of date, and Kodak announced in February 2012 that it was leaving the digital camera business. Today the most reliable route is LibRaw, the open-source raw decoder, whose camera list includes the DC40, DC50 and DC120 and later models such as the P880 and Z1015. Tools built on it include the rawpy Python package and LibRaw's own command-line samples. Raw editors such as RawTherapee and darktable read many old formats too, but test your own files. Apple's raw list doesn't include any KDC camera.

# pip install rawpy imageio
import rawpy, imageio.v3 as iio

with rawpy.imread("DC120_001.KDC") as raw:
    rgb = raw.postprocess(use_camera_wb=True)
iio.imwrite("DC120_001.png", rgb)

LibRaw identifies the camera from the file's contents, not its name, so a KDC that was renamed still opens. Commercial imaging SDKs such as LEADTOOLS also read the DC40, DC50 and DC120 variants. If one tool fails, try another: support for these files gets little testing now.

1. 1Copy the originals somewhere safe first, unchanged.
2. 2Convert each file with a LibRaw-based tool to a 16-bit TIFF or a PNG for viewing, and to DNG if you want to keep raw data in a documented format. The US National Archives recommends DNG for KDC.
3. 3Check a few results against the camera's era: colours may need a white-balance correction, because modern tools only approximate Kodak's processing.

KDC files carry the camera model, date and time and Kodak's settings; ExifTool's documentation includes a probable serial-number tag in later KDC files. KDC files contain no scripts or macros.