Slashdot Mirror
Canon Digital Rebel Hacked Into A Pseudo-10D
Reverb9 writes "When Canon introduced the Digital Rebel, the world's first entry-level Digital SLR camera, many remarked on its similarities to the 10D , its $500 more expensive big brother. In fact, the two cameras share much of the same technology and so Canon implemented a number of software-based limitations to avoid destroying sales of the professional-oriented 10D. Now, a new hack that restores a previously hidden menu along with a few additional tricks has added nearly all of those 10D features to the Rebel, with an arguably superior user interface to boot. Canon has so far said little on the hack but certainly cannot be happy with its potential effect on sales. This is, however, a reality that more corporations are having to confront. In an era where programming labour is relatively cheap and computer connectivity more frequent can artificial, marketing-driven, barriers between technology products, last?"
Canon has so far said little on the hack but certainly cannot be happy with its potential effect on sales.
That arguement is rediculous. What part of Canon's market that will shell out for that camera will apply this hack? Probably almost none of it, if they can find it or understand it. So that leaves the likes of the slashdot crowd, and that really isn't a big enough group to put a dent into Canon's sales.
The Canon 10D is aimed at pros, and what pro would actually rely on a "hack" to turn their Rebel into a 10D? These guys have to be able to trust their cameras completely and having hacked firmware will degrade that trust, no matter what the 1337 h4x0r community says.
Besides, what will happen to these pros when the next Canon firmware obliterates this hack? If the firmware provides needed fixes that they can't get without losing their "Rebel/10D", they're going to be mighty unhappy.
So I doubt Canon will be too worried about this: their target audience for the 10D isn't the hack-using geekerati, it's professionals. People who rely on their cameras aren't about to compromise reliability just to save a (relatively) few $$.
By what rationale? Neither "crippling" by the manufacturer, nor "uncrippling" by the end user should be a crime. Making either illegal is sheer idocy.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
1. Build a product out of [price] reach for most consumers;
2. Charge a more realistic price for a 'feature reduced' version;
3. Watch as it gets hacked;
4. Then watch sales climb high as people begin to believe (under false pretences) that they have got 'one over' on the company - people love a free ride or a good 'bargain'.
I like it!
You may have paid for the hardware, but the software is licensed to you. In this case, you are only allowed to use the portions of it that are openly available. That's the reason, among others, that this camera costs so much less that its bigger brother: it does less stuff. You want to do more stuff? Pay for the camera that does it.
There should be nothing preventing me from altering the software on the camera I bought. It's like telling me I can't write notes in the book I bought because it's not licensed for it. I don't agree to license the software in the camera btw, I buy the camera.
I touch computers in naughty places
That's funny ... I remember DeCSS. My friend had the T-shirt. I read and loved the haiku.
I also remember how thousands of hackers won out in the end, and have libdvdcss and libdvdread installed on their systems. And remember how DVD-Jon was aquitted? Twice? That was sweet.
It's too bad that the DMCA brought us all down in the end. Every day i lament the fact that I can't download pirated movies off the internet before they're released in the theatre, and that I also can't watch dvd's on my computer.
It really sucks.
From everything I've seen about the Rebel, it is a much more cheaply made piece of equipment. "As a professional" I would consider the more robust design of the 10D (which is due for a replacement/update by the way) to make it a superior camera, for reasons unrelated to the chip set and its functions. Furthermore, as a professional, I am considering the Rebel as a backup digital body, without any hacking. It just doesn't look like a good bet for a high use high reliability camera, although it has its potential uses. But even with functions hacked, it is unlikely to equal a 10d.
As for the "propriety" of crippling functionality, get a clue. The fact that a company can give something away at no cost doesn't mean that it is evil if it doesn't.
Look at it this way: The price for the low function and high function products is probably lower (over time, ceteris parabus, etc. etc.) because the development cost is amortized over a larger market which includes the low and high function products instead of just the high function products.
Of course the company could distribute the benefits of the larger manufacturing run to different market segments depending on compeitition... but somewhere, if the market is competitive, the consumer is a winner, if the company can sell more of those chips by crippling some of them.
Think about it.
Some of the stuff in this thread is just insane. And far and beyond normal idiocy.
1.Since this camera was announced we knew it would be hacked it was just a matter of time.
2.Canon knew it would be hacked.
3.If you only knew how many times products are crippled/disabled and priced lower so that high end stuff still sells? anyone remember 3.5 single sided floppies? Companies do what is in there own best interest.. err in the stockholders best interest. Do some of you really think Canon is doing this to pull one over on you? No they are doing what will make the most money for their shareholders.
4.I think the anaology to overclocking is not valid. Chips are clocked at set speeds becuase they are stable at that speed, If AMD/Intel sold the 2.4 rated chip as a 3.0 which it is in some cases IDENTICAL, people would complain since the 2.4 rated chips can't really handle those speeds and crash. AMD and Intel love overclockers cuz they buy more chips then anyone else, since they fry things all the time.
5.All in all this will not really affect 10d sales, for all the reasons listed above, stability, ability to interface with higher end equipment, better case, higher quality parts, and certain features that the 300d can't so at all.
6.300d sales will go up since this just became the geek camera of the year.
Also on a side note no one has mentioned that people have been hacking the Canon lenses to get more f-stops and zoom out of them for awhile. Canon restricts some lenses since the quality becomes adversly affected at min and max. So some people have removed the stops and taken the quality hit for more versitility.
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
Yeah, because I frequently need to stop bullets or pound nails and stuff with my $1000 camera.
:-)
You'll be wanting a Nikon F4 then
But seriously, when you hire a photographer, you aren't paying for someone to point the camera and press the shutter button. You're paying for someone to take the responsibility for delivering pictures. For a one-time event like a wedding, a photographer simply can't risk equipment failure. A photographer working away from civilization, such as a nature photographer or a photojournalist, simply can't risk equipment failure. That's why these people are willing to pay $5000 or more for the EOS-1D and the like.
The people buying the 10D are the ones who can't justify the cost of a 1D, but need more reliability than a consumer model can give them. Maybe they like to travel a lot for example. The people buying the 300D won't have reliability near the top of the priorities. That's not to say that the 300D is necessarily flimsy, but it's just not built to take abuse. Canon made no secret that the sensor in the 300D is exactly the same as the one in the 10D, and unlike Nikon, all EF lenses work perfectly with all EOS bodies, so image quality isn't a reason to choose between them.
Assuming they can sell the crippled item at a lower cost and still make a profit, there's no reason they couldn't sell the full-featured version at the same price and still make a profit.
Well, yes and no. Clearly Cannon can still make a per-unit profit on selling the less expensive camera, but they still have to recover their engineering costs. For cutting edge technology, those are probably non-trivial.
Cannon no doubt developed a strategy for repaying them based on selling X number of full-featured units at a high price, and Y crippled units at a low price.
The whole reason for releasing products with intentionally crippled functionality (which in the electronics world goes back at least to Intel's 486SX, and probably much further) is to minimize engineering overhead by not having to design a new product. While it seems ridiculous to us to sell a product with important features disabled, its a very natural side effect of the economies of scale that the electronics industry has created. That is, it's cheaper to make a million of the same chip, and break half of them, then to make half a million of two separate designs.
Put yet another way: You can bitch all you want, but if Cannon hadn't been able to release the crippled camera, they might not have made the thing in the first place.
> Instead should have a $200 Photoshop for everyone.
Excellent post. You really made me question some of my thinking on the subject.
Have you considered, however, that adding back all of that crippled functionality can actually be a *negative* to many consumers? I have a friend who wanted to get a Photoshop-ish paint program to do basic image editing that got no more complicated than cropping and un-red-eyeing digital photos and a little messing around with scanning. He was determined to buy something on the level of Photoshop Lite, but I installed Gimp for him since it's more or less the full Photoshop. I was showing him the zillions of features that were available when he said "What the hell is all *that* for? All I want to do is send pictures to my mother!" Ignoring the whole commercial vs. open source aspect of it, I think there's a very large group of consumers out there who really *don't* want the full versions of products. If you get out of the hacker mindset then there really *is* such a thing as too much power / too many options. By just selling one version of Photoshop / Office with every function enabled, how many sales will actually be *lost?*
Also consider the fact that enabling those few added functions are what suddenly makes a product / software package go from being a "thing to use a little around the house" to "a professional tool to use to earn a living." How much of the value of a camera or imaging software comes from what that product represents in future income to the consumer? Does that make the product worth more money? Should the added value of those few menu options be ignored since they're essentially just a switch flipped in the compiler? I think your questions about luxury and high-quality are good, but one man's "high quality" is another man's "too damned complicated!"