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Closed Digital Cameras - Does Anyone Care?
Karamchand asks: "Free Software and open standards are ubiquitous in the server and even desktop area. But why does nobody seem to care about openness in digital cameras? I couldn't find a single hint as to what main processor my camera uses (I guess many use ARMs and others use TI DSPs), and while searching for information about (re-)programming digital cameras, I had to give up (apart from the scriptable Digita OS which was used by some discontinued cameras by Kodak, HP et al). Do you know of any efforts in this direction, whether they are actual disassembling/programming of cameras or asking vendors to get more open?" I still have my Kodak DIGITA-based camera from several years ago and I loved the flexibility, even though the performance is poor by today's standards (long cycle times, poor battery life, etc). Why are digital camera manufacturers keeping the lid on the capabilities of their products, when digital cameras could be so much more than their film-based counterparts?
Why are digital camera manufacturers keeping the lid on the capabilities of their products
I'm guessing any for-profit companies will be keeping the lid on the capabilities of their products, so that they can slowly roll out "new" features every quarter, and consumers will be attracted to upgrading.
when digital cameras could be so much more than their film-based counterparts?
Seriously? I would rather digital cameras function like, and only like a camera. I'm already having hard time finding a standard mobile phone that makes calls, and that's all it does.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Are you planning on writing some custom software to run on your camera? Heh, I'll never stop to be amazed by the creativity of some people! Digital cameras are like Macs - they 'just work'. I haven't heard of any efforts to customize them, or build an open one.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
They already are so much more than their digital counterparts. And personally, even though I am a super-techno-gearhead-whatever, I don't really care to mess with the internals of my digital camera as long as I can get the pictures off of it.
Two words: "Unintended uses"
The camera manufacturers want to control how their cameras are used, within the realm of what control they can have. Imagine camera hackers adding functionality with the new software, creating software that uses the hardware more efficiently, adding new compression formats... People wouldn't upgrade nearly as soon as they otherwise would.
There are probably some bad examples too: a virus that detects when a camera is connected, updates the firmware, and then without a complete reflash of the ROMs, every time you turn on your camera it starts zooming in and out and you can't stop it. Who wants the bad publicity of being the first camera to be virus infected?
Last, and probably most importantly, the trouble of publishing the specs and documenting the hardware so that programmers could actually really dig into the system... well, it's an expensive proposition. Convince them that enough people who wouldn't have bought the camera would change their minds if there was a programming interface - make it make financial sense - and they might do it.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Answer: no. Where's my open source cell phone, playstation 2, ipod, microwave oven, roomba, etc? Most people are only concerned that the product they use functions as it was intended.
What is it you want access to change? The camera really has 2 or 3 base functions that can only be improved within the confines of the hardware. Why does everything have to be open? Just because it's there and you like to hack?
I'm not flaming/trolling, I just don't see the point of your question...
Because the vast majority of people just want to take pictures, and the last thing camera companies want to do is spend lots of time documenting stuff and answering support questions from the ten or so people who might want to do this.
The cake is a pie
Seriously, if manufactures let people hack/rewrite their firmware, how much does that increase their support overhead? (don't give me "users are on their own, it still costs $$)
I would imagine because nobody cares...
If you are starting from scratch, there is a lot to screw up. First of all, you need to get the metering right, which is far from trivial. You also need to be able to auto-focus, which is also far from trivial. And this is AFTER you figure out the interface to the CCD, LCD, and buttons. Plus, you have to know how to control the zoom motor, auto-focus motor, and flash.
If you DID re-invent the wheel (and did a good job of it), what do you gain at the end? Sure, you might be able to improve metering a little. You might be able to improve the user interface. But if a camera has a raw file format, you are already getting all of the quality that the hardware can deliver. And JPEG already has pretty good compression, so it is hard to improve on that.
I saved the best part for last. You go through all of this work on a 5MP camera, which is discontinued after one year and replaced by a 7MP model with a different architecture. So, you decide to upgrade, and throw all of your work in the trash.
If you want to, feel free. But include me out.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
What phone are you using? I went through a couple of them, and had good luck with third-party cables and software. I had an LG-VX6000 before i moved to Sprint, if i remember right. A $25 cable and the freeware bitpim software allowed me to pull the pics off without paying verizon. I believe it supports quite a few brands and types of phones.
Besides the question of why you'd want to do that, I doubt there would be THAT many features you could eek out of the hardware that the firmware doesn't already support. I'll be the no.1 reason is because they don't want a bunch of wanna-be 'hackers' toasting their cameras and sending them in for repair saying, 'gee, I don't know what happened, but it's not working anymore, please send me a brand new one.'
Ever wonder why the firmware for your microwave isn't open? Wow, imagine the possibilities!?!? Their just is too much risk for the payoff of releasing all that data and being 'open'. Besides, ever think that there might be some IP in that firmware?
I'm not a big photography nut, and don't personally own a digital camera, but what neato effects can the little ARM do in the camera that cannot be done later on a 3+ghz desktop running photoshop?
I still have my Kodak DIGITA-based camera from several years ago and I loved the flexibility, even though the performance is poor by today's standards (long cycle times, poor battery life, etc). Why are digital camera manufacturers keeping the lid on the capabilities of their products, when digital cameras could be so much more than their film-based counterparts?
Because they don't want you keeping their cameras for several years. They want you to upgrade every year or, at most, every two. Most digital cameras are all-in-one affairs -- a one-time purchase. It's not like the days of old when Kodak could sell a 35mm point-and-shoot and count on film sales for years to come. Nor is it like the SLR market, where the camera body is just the initial sale and the consumer will buy multiple lenses, expensive flashes, and filters.
Even in the digital SLR market, the manufacturers still have not introduced replaceable "film" backs that allow consumers to upgrade the CMOS sensors as higher resolution comes out. And that's probably why the digital SLR market is not taking off faster. No one wants to spend over a grand on a digital SLR and then, a year later, find that $300 point-and-shoot cameras have double the resolution. It's not like my Nikon 6006, where I can "upgrade" the camera's performance by purchasing newer, better film.
I don't know why camera companies make their camera's locked down, but it might have something to do with support costs. Make the software easy and limited and you don't have to worry about people fucking them up.
The other thing is, I think that the majority of people who buy a camera, digital or otherwise just want it to 'work'. The low-cost of actually using digital cameras, as opposed to their film counterparts has lead to a lot more people taking pictures as a hobby (I regularly see people randomly walking around snapping pictures of buildings and stuff now), which means more people are going to be interested in messing around with the shutter, etc.
But not many people are going to want to try hacking the CCD driver to to take prettier pictures. Not many people are going to want to play video games on their cameras when they could buy a gameboy or something, and really there aren't that many interesting applications to put on a camera.
(the few I can think of involve automation, for doing things like time-lapse photos and such, but you could always just hook a camera up to a regular computer to do that)
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The difference between digital cameras are often the software. The same camera can be sold in different packges (Canon IXUS/Elph vs their S-series vs G-series), and they are basicly the same camera with different sensors and packaging.
The cheap cameras has very bad image processing algorithms, so they would gain from open software. They would still use an old plastic bottle for molding the lens though.
The famous example of camera hacking is the Russian hack for the low-end Canon EOS 300D. 2 bytes changed enabled the custom functions menu of the big brother, the 10D. Then there were a few more mods. Think the best firmware had 20 bytes changed, and closed the gap between the 2 products.
The is also lots of things that are the same between the Canon 20D and the Canon 1D Mk II. If the extra features were enabled in the 20D, there would be even less reason to pay 3 times as much for the 1D Mk II. (It also has more buffer RAM + weather sealing).
So it is there in the hope they can sell the same product as 3 different ones.
Your camera already works, so why fix something that's not broken? I couldn't imagine tinkering with the code or hardware of a late-model digital camera -- it'd be way too complex. Most of the functions are probably implemented in hardware, too, so modifying any sort of firmware is unlikely to get you anywhere. The level of integration is sure to be extremely high.
The only cameras that have been looked at and disassembled are the Dakota Digital/CVS "one-time-use" cameras. It's because they're cheap, and hold the promise of extended reuse. They don't have very many features, and probably can't have any more added to them. The attraction is the challenge of breaking a "closed" system, and getting something for (close to) nothing.
The original blue Dakota was based on a custom Sunplus chip. So far there's been one modified firmware release that fixes bugs and extends the picture limit. This model has been discontinued, however. More info here, here, and here.
The newer models have been looked at in depth as well, and they're based on SMaL chipsets. So far methods of reading and writing have been uncovered, and a method of downloading pictures via hacked drivers is documented. The eventual goal is a GPL driver and sofware, and possibly firmware upgrades. Current progress here, and background info here and here.
How many crappy cell-phone pictures do you need? Is it more than 100? If it's not, it makes more sense to email them to yourself for $0.25.
My other first post is car post.
Digital cameras are actualy conciderd "consumer devices" and as such are closed to optimize reliability, performance and cost (Much like the recently hotly argued Mac Mini, only more so).
Cell Phones didn't used to be open either, and it's only the cross-over into dual purpose PDA/Phone land that has opened them up. So the question is does your toaster make tell you what alloy it uses in the heating elements? No! Because you aren't supposed to care, and if you did there is probably little you could do to improve upon whay they already have.
Also remember that Digital cameras are rife with proprietary hardware, we're not just talking a hefty RISC CPU crunching numbers on raw data, we're talking about screens that use non-standard resolutions and refresh rates and have proprietary drivers, image optimization ICs that run in combined digital/analog mode to eek the most possible performance out of a given sensor device, etc etc. In most cameras the only things that are even remotely standards based are the flash-card controllers.
If someone were to build a standards-based digital camera that could contain user-upgrable parts/software it would end up either sacrificing a great deal of performance over a device thats not constrained by standards or cost twice as much as the competition.
I for one, as a photographer, appreciate that my digital camera never crashes, (almost) never needs a software update, and gets the most possible performance out of the hardware that they could cram into it.
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
'Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None, obviously market forces will take care of it. '
I see your point, but then I thought about it, and it is actually correct... market forces _would_ take care of it. If a panzer division were coming for Wall Street, then suddenly it would be in Wall Street's best interests to stop it. They'd go buy a few nukes and flatten that division, or something along those lines.
just sayin
My Sony DSC 717 takes infrared photos. You can hear the "clunk" as it moves the IR hot mirror out of the way for "Night Shot" mode. It would be perfect for a low-cost scientific aerial mapping application (e.g., http://www.soils.wisc.edu/~wayne/aerial_photos/aer ials_2003_06_14/), replacing custom-built cameras worth thousands of dollars.
But, because somebody once took naughty pictures with a Sony Handicam (http://news.com.com/2100-1001-214389.html?legacy= cnet, Sony crippled the IR function. Now it only works at wide apertures and slow shutter speeds, leaving aerial IR pictures hopelessly overexposed (yes, I tried ND filters) and blurry (I can only slow to about 70 MPH or the nose rises, as do the passengers' gorges).
A simple "don't do that" hack to the firmware would suffice. You *know* that the cripplage is only a couple of lines of code:
But, when asked formally and with the full references to the scientific research we were doing (the lead prof, BTW, is internationally renowned in the field, we ain't just grubby grad students looking to save a buck and peek at Auntie Bowdler's bra), Sony blew us off.
Open source firmware? You bet we'd go for it.
I just wish my camera would name my photos with something that means something to a human like me like a date stamp.
t ead of MsomeMeaninglessNumber.tiff
05-01-22.220059.tiff
05-01-22.220102.tiff
ins
If it were "open" I could control how this worked.