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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?"
Yes, when they're enforced by the DMCA and jail sentences for those who reverse-engineer them. (Remember DeCSS? The outcry over DeCSS was just a preview; things are going to get a lot worse, not better.)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I've been meaning to buy the Digital Rebel/300D ever since it was released, but somehow was held back by the lack of the Mirror Lockup feature. Now that this hack enables that feature, I think I'll go pick one of these babies up very soon. I already have a nice collection of Canon EF and EF L lenses that the 300D can take.
Some of the Sony Minidisc players had features disabled through software. I, for one, was able to get many new features on mine after enering the service menu.
This will be happening a lot in the future... it's a good thing though, if they can make a product more powerful for that amount of money than they should do so. Marking up the same hardware and because you don't have artifical barriers on it should be a crime...
Unfortunately, it's breaking these artifical barriers to make full use of hardware you paid for that a crime in our society.
I touch computers in naughty places
My Comcast cablebox (motoral model unknown, somewhere from c.1992) is a POS. I called Comcast for tech support because my volume was too low
Fast forward some months
This one feature was useful enough for me to keep two different codes for my one cable box on one remote.
I'm still searching for the CC button, like aztec gold.
In this particular case the hack involved restoring some capabilities, which while present in the hardware, had been locked or hidden by software. Certainly this individual deserves his due for circumventing the software barriers. However, in software products it is much easier to simply leave sections of code out of the finished build in the lesser versions. If the functionality is not there in the first place then no amount of unlocking will enable it. This incident raises important issues about the sale and marketing of technology products, especially in the digital camera market. It is my opinion that the industry has vastly underestimated the demand among consumers for more powerful "professional" grade digital cameras. It would probably make more sense from both a business and technology standpoint to offer the full camera at a price which is higher than the basic entry level model, but less than the full "professional" model since most of the work was probably in the design of the hardware and software and not as much in the manufacturing. People are generally willing to pay for a well built product as long as they know that the quality is there.
Common, I'm sure Canon had a sense that this was going to happen, eventually. The only question was 'WHEN'. Just like lots of 'trial' versions of software either have a 15day evaluation, and/or some things removed, there's usually always a 'crack' that will re-implement these things. Anyways, just like intel and many (or nearly ALL) of their CPUs in a certain chunk of their roadmap, are the same. Anyways, this could have been a good move for Canon, moving the Canon-10D (EXCELLENT camera, I own one) into more of the consume price range, resulting in more sales!
Heh, this sort of reminds me about how video cards, particularly in the last couple years, are disabling a few pipelines in the bios/software, only to have users flash a bios and increase the pipelines (the Radeon 9500 non pro (4 pipes) to 9700 (8 pipes) comes to mind). Inevitably companies will catch up to this, such as ATI did, and the soft-modabble 9500 was discontinued in favor of the 9600 models, which have a totally different core and only 4 pipelines physically on the card.
If you have to ask, you'll never know.
I interned at a company with a product like that around 10 years ago. They sent out an install disk that flipped a bit in flash memory to turn on a feature and then spent 30 seconds churning the disk and updating a progress bar just so the customer wouldn't feel like a schmuck.
Actually, in most cases there will just be a simple bond out option for the die which will determine whther or not a pin is connected.
The best easter egg in a car I think is this one. Have not found the hidden launch control on my 10 year old rustbucket, though. I am taking apart the digital clock this weekend to find it.
This tale is all hearsay, and I've never confirmed it (please don't nitpick on my model numbers, but I believe it was the 8L/4L):
When HP orignally launched their Laserjet 8L, they were having trouble generating enough sales for the product. I'm not sure why, but perhaps it was because a lot of the desktop publishing market at the time belonged to Apple, who had the Laserwriter out on the market. That's neither here nor there, though.
The 8L could do, IIRC something like 10 or 11 ppm. So HP took the 8L, and through the use of a slightly different gearing, produced the 4L, which was nearly identical except for a slower print-rate, somewhere in the 5 ot 6 ppm range, which was still quite nice for the time. They sold the 4L for about half of what the 8L went for. All of a sudden, they were selling a huge amount of 4Ls, but there were also a ton of companies that realized that a 4L wouldn't be enough for their branch office, or whatever, so they purchased the "upgraded" 8L, instead. Enterprising users could, presumably, order the gear set (and whatever associated parts went with the actual 8L) and "hard mod" their 4L into an 8L.
Way back when, the local phone company shipped out these cheap caller ID boxes when you ordered new service. They sent the lowest end model, which only shows the name and had ~50 number memory.
:P
One day bored, I opened the box up and found that there was *1* soider point that would upgrade it to "name" caller ID, and 200+ more number memory.
The difference in price bewteen the 2 models was like $40.
Honestly, I don't think many people will do this change to upgrade there camera. Personally, I wouldn't becuase those damn things are expensive compaired to my $100 digital camera
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Name one example of this. Everything I've seen that you state is in addition to several other modifications. For example, the engine in the Gen 1 and 2 DSM's (Eclipse, Talon, and Laser) may have lower boost as compared to the Euro model of that engine, but it also has smaller intake and exhaust manifolds, a smaller turbo, different fueling, etc.
The Audi S4 and RS4 have the same engine, but the turbos differ, as do the heads, exhaust and intake manifolds, the entire intake tract, intercoolers, etc. Everything appears to be the same, but it's not apparent until you start taking things apart.
We get screwed here in the US. Most foreign car manufacturers detune the cars for the US market due to emissions regulations, insurance reasons, or whatever. But that detuning rarely involves simply changing software or boost levels for turbos/superchargers. Usually, major components of the engine are "downgraded" also because they don't need to spend the extra money to support the same amount of air or fuel flow as they do on the european counterpart.
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Saving $500 is quite a lot, I'll bet a number of normal people figure out how to apply this hack with detail instructions from message boards and the like.
I really thought it was odd of Canon to differentiate the software at all - they should haver just kept the price differential to a resnable cost for a sturdier body.
Both are really prosumer cameras, I think people shopping for one would be thinking about the other - like you say, the real difference is when you are going for a 1D or a 1Ds.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Many other photocopier models offering different speeds were identical except for the controller boards, and swapping those over wasn't uncommon either; in fact, at one stage the distributor used to officially sanction it because the manufacturer was screwing them over.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I know a lot of companies are going to get upset about people doing a kind of arbitrage pricing. Enough other people have ranted about that.
A more interesting point is the positive opportunity this offers for camera manufacturers. Who will be first to ship a programmable and hackable camera, with at least partially open source firmware?
I don't think it's such a crazy idea. There is a fair degree of overlap between digital camera buyers and programmers, or at least people likely to have access to programmers. A pro photographer or press agency might well want to invest a couple of days of programmer time to add some feature they really need. I'm imagining something like the old HP programmable calculators.
There are some ugly edges in the UI of my Minolta camera. It's a great camera in many ways, and the problems are perhaps not serious enough to warrant an official patch from Minolta. But they could be fixed purely in software, and if it were reasonably easy to change it I might do it myself.
There are a few issues you'd need to sort out: hopefully the software shouldn't be able to physically damage the camera, and there needs to be some way to easily get back to the default if you screw it up. I don't think those are impossible to overcome.
What could you add?
- rebind keys to suit the features you most often use
- digital effects on the camera, such as multiple-exposure
- capture coordinates from a GPS or notes from a PDA by bluetooth
- better downsampling
- Probably many more I haven't thought of yet. Look at all the diverse things people have done with Palm devices or MP3 players.
The potential of programmable devices is much larger than even the best hardcoded device.
After finding out I got ripped off by one of those digital descrambler filters, I was messing around with different combos on my motorola box and brought up a setup menu. I made several changes, and the unit stopped working. The next day, Comcast called and asked what had happened to the unit.
CD-Burners. About a year ago, i read an article in Computer Power User about how just a firmware upgrade would boost your burner speed.
There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there sure are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
It's not necessarily exactly cheaper. The hardware does have a significant cost, which is soaked up by the manufacturer unless/until the customer turns it on.
I think the point is more that you can sell it to them immediately when the want it -- a kind of corporate impulse shopping.
If I know that adding more CPUs is going to require ordering them, arranging downtime, bringing the machine down, physically installing the CPUs, bringing it back up and hoping nothing broke then I might think twice, and try to get by without it for a bit longer. If all I need to do is click a button and pay the account at the end of the month, I am that much more likely to just do it. For many of them they don't even physically send you a disk, they just email you the magic number, or you get it yourself over the net.
Another factor is that although the hardware does have a margin cost, it's relatively low. You tend to see this on zseries, ia64, sparc and ppc machines where the manufacturer does not sell an enormous number of them in a year, and they are always trying to recoup their NRE expenses. If they can get a chance at persuading the customer to buy 20 CPUs rather than 10 then it's worth absorbing the cost of having the CPUs sit there for a while before they're sold. The silicon does not cost all that much compared to the R&D.
Amusingly enough Caterpillar also "sells" gianormous earthmoving equipment on a similar scheme, called Power by the Hour. You give them an estimate of how long you want the D10 bulldozer for, and it just turns up.
I personally know 3 people who own this camera, all of them have applied the hack. They have been buzzing about it since folks started posting on www.dpreview.com a few weeks ago.
Despite what conceded slashdot'rs think, average camera nerds can indeed find links on the internet and are also capable of following simple instructions.
This will most certainly hurt sales of the 10D. Many people are more than willing to give up a metal body to save $500!
Software hacks and the price differential of a few hundred bucks are fairly irrelevant when the camera's power can really only be unleashed with pro lenses costing $1500 or $2000 (and up) rather than the cheap crap lens that comes with a stock Rebel unit. It's not uncommon for a serious photog to have tens of thousands of bucks invested in lenses. Do you really think that this sort of pro would balk at the 10D's price and get a hacked Rebel instead?
I also bought my 10D for reasons more than software/firmware capabilities. I knew the 300D (Digital Rebel) was crippled in some ways, including focus modes, but I still prefer the 10D for its overall build quality, the 10D has a magnesium-alloy body as opposed to the 300D's plastic body.
Other issues include the 300D's increased "mirror slap" which can cause some camera shake, not good for those long exposures. Also a slower shutter time and longer viewfinder blackout time.
This isn't to say the 300D isn't a good body, it's going to do wonders for those aspiring pros who can't quite afford higher end gear yet, but it still isn't a 10D.
------------ Ben Chroneos
with a fair choice on a open market
As if such a thing truly exists outside of econ textbooks...
The idea of the market value of an item being the cost of labor to produce it went out with the 17th century
It did? If you expand "cost of labor" to "cost of production" (which trickles down to cost of labor at one point or another), then that's exactly the long-term competitive price: marginal cost of production.
When starting a business, what do you look at to see how you are doing? Your margins. The difference between your costs and your revenues. When that drops to (economic) zero, you start thinking about starting another business.
How do you spot a monopolist (possibly legal or illegal)? High margins!
I'd say the concept of "cost" is still fundamental to economics.
Of course we probably agree that the government shouldn't fix prices at cost, or something, but they also shouldn't stand in the way of Canon shooting itself in the foot by offering similar products at two different prices.
PS: the commies are <---- this way .. to the LEFT you know! :-)
It is to some people. My friend (still is my friend) drove over my Canon EOS Elan 7, which has a magnesium frame. the lens was toast and was ripped off the camera.
The camera, however, could still rewind the film and could still pop the flash out. When i brought it into the shop, they were amazed that not only did all the electronics still work and were calibrated, the film plane was still in alignment with the lens! One of the things that made the difference was it's metal construction: if the lens bayonet had been polycarbonate (as it is on the rebels) then likely the camera would have just pulled apart, but as it is metal, i lost a cheap lens.
try running over a rebel with a car.
And I still use my Canon A-1 from 1981 as my primary 35mm camera because it never lets me down. And I have a CanonScan FS4000US film scanner as well.
BUT, when they pull this kind of crap of crippling products simply so that they can turn on more features and charge much higher prices, it makes me consider that I don't want to buy from them again in the future.
What I don't understand is that if you can build a camera with these features at this price, why someone doesn't, and eat Canon's lunch in the process!
P.S. I feel the same way about Dell, this posting being typed on one of our first, 8-year-old machines that is still used every day, and whose computers we've used exclusively up until now, but whose dogged insane refusal to use AMD processors now has me now looking for a new vendor because I can't buy an Athlon64 from Dell.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It's not just the sturdier body, either. The 300D has a very small buffer, with space for just 4 shots instead of 9 on the 10D. That's a pretty big disadvantage given the slow write speed of Canon's cameras (or at least the ones with the original DIGIC chip). I can imagine cases- like taking studio portraits- where that kind of limited burst size wouldn't be a serious disadvantage, but I doubt that the crippled firmware in the 300D would be a serious problem in those cases either.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
No, no, no.
The point of this discovery is not that you can get a higher-end product for cheaper if you know a few tricks.
It's that companies are selling the masses crippled products that are identical to their high-end line but for some software lockout. 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.
Consumers are getting the shaft any time they buy these crippled products. They shouldn't HAVE to hack something to unlock built-in features. Products like the Canon Digital Rebel, and Microsoft Works, have no true place in the market. They only serve to keep the prices of better products artificially high.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Oddly enough, I was thinking about this topic just this morning. My Nikon F5 was worth the multi-kilobuck price tag because it was built like a tank. It'll last for thousands and thousands of rolls of film. But it won't take any better pictures than the cheapest 35mm that Nikon makes.
Pros have always accepted this. A good photographer can take a cheap camera and turn out the same wonderful work he can do with an expensive camera. The difference is that the more expensive camera makes things more convenient and is built better to last longer under the rough conditions pros must endure.
That's why pro cameras are more expensive. They don't *really* have any secret technology that makes better pictures. They're just tougher and more capable of accomplishing a given task more readily under deadline.
But digital changes all that.
When the Nikon D70 appeared, Nikon officially said it wouldn't replace the prosumer D100. However, the D100 immediately dropped out of the sales catalog of several large camera vendors. They know that the cheaper camera will cannibalize the sales of the more expensive one because the cheaper camera, while probably less well built and slightly less convenient, has better image capturing hardware and software. And that's the one thing that will make a pro change cameras faster than you change your shirt; Show 'em something that takes better prictures and everything else be damned, they'll go for the better output quality.
So if you're a pro and you're shooting digital, what do you do? Stick with the better made, more convenient pro cameras? Or just buy the latest cheap thing because it has more megapixels and better quality? The answer is that better quality almost always wins. (Yes, in some situations speed is important and pros will use a lower megazixel count if they get faster shutter response, but that is becoming less and less of an issue every day. Consequently, the Nikon D1 series that was built to capitalize on that need is being marginalized.)
Now, with film, output quality was a constant and pretty static, to boot. Therefore, it made sense for pros to get a camera built to last forever and paying through the nose for it was no big deal. With digital, though, the camera that will be introduced next year will have better image quality than whatever you're holding in your hands now. So what's the point of paying for high-quality construction made to last 20 years? You're gonna wanna dump your camera in two years, tops, to get the better image quality of the new gear.
This turns the whole professional camera selection criteria on its ear. I predict that "pro" digital cameras will soon come to be treated by their users as virtually disposable, something to be used hard for a year and then upgraded. When that happens, pros won't want to pay as much so they'll just buy one more spare than usual.
In the future, cameras will come to be treated as what they have become: computers. The pro photo industry has always taken great pride in their well-built cameras that were made to last a lifetime. (Hell, I still love my Nikon F.) That attitude arose because mechanical refinement was the only market differentiator when everyone uses the same film and gets close to the same output quality. But now digital has changed the rate of change. Now cameras will be obsoleted in months instead of decades. How will the industry adapt? How willing will pros be to give up the snob appeal of their ridiculously expensive cameras and use the same equipment as regular folks? Or will they be so wedded to the need to pay extra money for prestige brands and models that they will continue to pony up big bucks for ridiculously small differences between models?
These are highly interesting times in the photo world. I'm not willing to predict the death of the pro camera, but I predict the pro digital camera of the future will be far close to the what regular consumers use than has previously been the case. And that's a big change.
Oh, one little complaint---The zoom ring on the 55-200 doesn't move as smoothly as I'd like, which can make it a pain to fine-tune the focal length.
Of course, take my remarks about the quality of these lenses with a grain of salt. I'm new to SLRs (film or digital) and I've only used these Sigma lenses on my camera so far, which doesn't give me a real point of comparison for their quality.
Find this lens on froogle
Hate stupid software on freshmeat? Laugh at
First of all, some of the cars you mentioned have transversely mounted engines, and others have longitudinaly mounted engines. Their exhaust piping among other things is different even if the block and the head is the same.
Secondly, there are several 1.8T engines denoted by their engine codes: AEB, AWM, ATW are just a few.
Some are drive-by-wire, some aren't. Some have different intake manifolds. Newer models have slightly different turbos.
So "no changes what so ever to the hardware side" my ass.
My parents VCR that they purchased in 1987 was a cheaper model minus some features of the top of the line VCR. Well my Dad, being the kid of guy he is took it apart for some reason that I no longer remember, and inside found a hidden switch and after moving it, it became the higher end model. We even went and purchased a "replacement" remote for the better model to make some of the new features easier to use.
==>Lazn
Some of you are forgetting that by cutting down test time for each chip feature, you get the benefits of a higher yield and less time involved with testing. Intel and Motorola and most likely AMD also, have setup so that if one part of the cache is bad they can still use the chip as a different product. I believe you will find that the S86 from a few years back,the Celeron and Duron are due to this volume vs features approach. Additionally, at one time, and most likely still, memory chips had extra arrays that could be selectively deleted to make sure the final version had the advertised size. Canon could very easily use this same approach for cameras, and have a somewhat lowercost product by disabling features they don't want to test and warrant to the end user.
Hack at your own risk, and I am sure some of us will end up with a product with features that do not work properly.