i'm never sure about binmode, never had to use it. same with utf8, but that's where your problem lies. go check out perldoc perldelta and see what it says about utf8

$ perl -e '$f="\xff\x01\x67";print $f' | od -t x1
0000000 ff 01 67
0000003

$ perl -e '$f="\xff\x01\x67";use Encode; $f=encode("utf8", decode("iso
+-8859-1",$f));print $f' | od -t x1
0000000 c3 bf 01 67
0000004
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