Hacking Canon Point-and-Shoot Cameras 242
Pig Hogger writes "If you're stuck with a cheap Canon point-and-shoot camera and have feature envy over the neighbor's sophisticated latest model, fret not! According to this LifeHacker article, the CHDK project allows nearly complete programmatic control of cheap Canon point-and-shoot cameras, enabling users to add features, up to and including games and BASIC scripting."
Fire the cannons, Canon? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sidenote: I had an old A80 camera that's maybe 6 years old stopped taking pictures. Turns out there was an old technical bulletin about it in their KB and that Canon was offering free repairs to any affected unit regardless of its age. I sent it in and they did what they promised AND the turnaround was around a week.
Ease of use... (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How long before... (Score:4, Interesting)
(Is there any alternative firmware for the 350D onwards, or have the hackers simply not bothered?)
Re:The question is... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not really (Score:4, Interesting)
Uh, How about the fact that there are no JPEG compression artifacts on a RAW image?
Re:Only Point and Shoots? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't actually know about point-and-shoots (I assume they don't have conventional shutters, what with all the live-preview stuff) - but digital SLRs most definitely do.
Actually, the best way to imagine a dSLR is as a film SLR, but with an image sensor taking the place of the film. The half-silvered, hinged mirror is still there for the viewfinder, as is the autofocus and metering gubbins arranged beneath it - on older dSLRs, the image sensor only gets to play when the mirror hinges up, blocking light from getting in through the viewfinder, and the shutter opens.
(Ever wondered what that funny rubber rectangle is on the camera strap? It's for putting over the viewfinder when you're about to take a long exposure - light getting in can confuse the metering system that's in front of the shutter...)
Re:Ease of use... (Score:4, Interesting)
(i) its a HACK and if Canon smell it, bang goes thy warranty;
(ii) CHDK are from/in Russia - genius programmers, but nationally a poor track record on the TRUST aspect.
The first one is addressed right here [wikia.com] on the site. And sorry, but I can't help you with your xenophobia.
I've used CHDK on my A710IS for about six months with zero problems. As many others have mentioned, it's incredibly easy to disable it, but the features that it adds are very handy.
CHDK saved the day (Score:3, Interesting)
Cool stuff. The HDR and RAW capabilities are incredible, for a $200 camera.
Re:Pointless (Score:3, Interesting)
To add to all of the information above, the purpose of a point-and-shoot is to make acceptable pictures that cover most common lighting situations. This means that a lot of JPEG compression/on-board editing has to be done to make that happen. For these kinds of cameras, the RAW exports are going to be much worse than that of an SLR because of the size of these sensors (those on SLR cameras are several millimeters larger). However, this is correctable on Adobe Camera RAW or similar software.
Re:How long before... (Score:3, Interesting)
I own and frequently use the 300D, and it's pretty obvious to any previous or current owner of this camera that this camera was Canon's experiment into consumer-priced SLRs, as it was nearly feature equivalent to the 10D (the only difference was the buffer size and 0.5 second shutter speed difference). The separation between the Rebels and the double-digit cameras has been widening ever since.
A great example is the Canon 400D and 450D. While they do take stunning pictures and are great SLR cameras in their own right, they are by far not on the same level of operation as the 30D and 40D, respectively. The feature and hardware gap are too great to upgrade those cameras to the higher-priced ones.
Regardless of which, I believe that Canon's offerings on the low-end have consistently been better than that of Nikon's, as their lowest end doesn't even come with a separate info screen (it's all software). On top of that, it's more expensive anyway.
Re:Pointless (Score:1, Interesting)
Avoiding the lossy compression of JPEG lets you record the image more accurately, it's true, but the problem with these small sensors is that unless you're shooting in absolutely ideal conditions, they're recording well into the noise floor already. So having RAW means you'll just have more accurately rendered noise, which means very little.
Almost everything about this post is wrong, which makes a (Score:5 Insightful) mystifying. The 1Ds uses a 11MP, full 35mm sensor. Perhaps you are referring to the original 1D, which did have a 4MP sensor, but it was APS-H sized (1.3x crop factor from 35mm), not APS-C (1.6 crop factor from 35mm). This is still many many times larger than the sensors on these tiny digicams. So each pixel on the 4MP 1D gets many times the light that a pixel on a 12MP point and shoot gets, and so has much less noise, even though it's almost 8 years old now.
This makes RAW data exceptionally useful on the 1D, and near useless on your garden-variety digicam.