DM4

File Format
Name	DM4
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Graphics DM4
Extension(s)	.dm4
Released	2013?

DM4 is an image format used by Digital Micrograph, a program used in transmission electron microscopy, often in order to interface with the hardware made by the company that releases it (Gatan). It contains a large amount of metadata in addition to the image itself. It succeeded DM3. It seems that it has only minor differences from DM3, possibily only limited to use of 64-bit integers as opposed to 32-bit ones and a size count for each tag (section).

Identification

DM4 files have the extension ".dm4". Their contents start with the version number big-endian, i.e. 00 00 00 04.

Software

• Digital Micrograph (made part of "Gatan Microscopy Suite") itself
• Bio-Formats
• The DM3_Reader plugin for ImageJ
• Fred Sigworth's importer for Matlab
• DM4Reader by James Anderson, written in Python

Links

• Unofficial format documentation