diff --git a/CHANGELOG b/CHANGELOG
index e3360318a..d3478b8af 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG
+++ b/CHANGELOG
@@ -48,6 +48,8 @@ Bug fixes / Maintenance
 - don't print empty lines when showing junitxml-filename
 - add optional boolean ignore_errors parameter to py.path.local.remove
 - fix terminal writing on win32/python2.4 
+- py.process.cmdexec() now tries harder to return properly encoded unicode objects 
+  on all python versions
 
 Changes between 1.3.0 and 1.3.1
 ==================================================
diff --git a/py/_process/cmdexec.py b/py/_process/cmdexec.py
index 0f38822d5..43c71629c 100644
--- a/py/_process/cmdexec.py
+++ b/py/_process/cmdexec.py
@@ -8,18 +8,25 @@ import py
 from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
 
 def cmdexec(cmd):
-    """ return output of executing 'cmd' in a separate process.
+    """ return unicode output of executing 'cmd' in a separate process.
 
     raise cmdexec.ExecutionFailed exeception if the command failed.
     the exception will provide an 'err' attribute containing
     the error-output from the command.
+    if the subprocess module does not provide a proper encoding/unicode strings
+    sys.getdefaultencoding() will be used, if that does not exist, 'UTF-8'.
     """
     process = subprocess.Popen(cmd, shell=True, 
             universal_newlines=True,
             stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
     out, err = process.communicate()
-    out = py.builtin._totext(out, sys.stdout.encoding)
-    err = py.builtin._totext(err, sys.stderr.encoding)
+    if sys.version_info[0] < 3: # on py3 we get unicode strings, on py2 not 
+        try:
+            default_encoding = sys.getdefaultencoding() # jython may not have it
+        except AttributeError:
+            default_encoding = sys.stdout.encoding or 'UTF-8'
+        out = unicode(out, process.stdout.encoding or default_encoding)
+        err = unicode(err, process.stderr.encoding or default_encoding)
     status = process.poll()
     if status:
         raise ExecutionFailed(status, status, cmd, out, err)
diff --git a/testing/process/test_cmdexec.py b/testing/process/test_cmdexec.py
index 79629d886..b539e0af3 100644
--- a/testing/process/test_cmdexec.py
+++ b/testing/process/test_cmdexec.py
@@ -8,11 +8,13 @@ class Test_exec_cmd:
     def test_simple(self):
         out = cmdexec('echo hallo')
         assert out.strip() == 'hallo'
+        assert py.builtin._istext(out)
 
     def test_simple_newline(self):
         import sys
         out = cmdexec(r"""%s -c "print ('hello')" """ % sys.executable)
         assert out == 'hello\n'
+        assert py.builtin._istext(out)
 
     def test_simple_error(self):
         py.test.raises (cmdexec.Error, cmdexec, 'exit 1')