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Hacking Canon Point-and-Shoot Cameras
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."
It's for more than that of course. It allows you to enable certain camera functions that do not exist in the shipping firmware, like RAW mode.
Canon hacking has hit mainstream, it seems... with extra visibility I'm sure the higher ups in the company will soon know about them (no doubt the engineers already knew about the project). I LOVE my Canon cameras, so, I really hope Canon doesn't pull an Apple or a Creative and start intentionally guarding against firmware hacks because then my future purchases will have to go elsewhere.
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.
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Um, changing the firmware isn't going to put a LCD screen on the mirror. Apparently you haven't grasped how a SLR works.
The firmware probably isn't going to be able to get the shutter to go any faster reliably. What you need to use is a ND filter if you like wide apertures.
Certainly the scripting stuff could be used in a SLR.
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The risk of screwing up your camera comes from potentially feeding it a parameter outside of it's safety zone.
For instance what if there were a RAM mode in the hacked firmware for firing the flash at a rate faster than the camera's default firmware would allow. You try it for that super cool skateboard picture and wonder why your flash Fresnel is brown and smoking after the fact. Granted the caps shouldn't be able to do that, but what if?
Or you try to drive the aperture 1 click past its physical limit? Do you know if the camera has limit switches or is relying on firmware pointing to known values in RAM (pulled from EEPROM at boot) that define the scope of aperture values to control that motor? Maybe it can handle a few slams at the end of travel, but what if you keep doing it by mistake?
Or you use a mode to leave the LCD backlight on while the flash caps recharge (normally the LCD backlight is off) and you fry the power supply in the camera because you sourced too much current?
Or you use a mode to drive the lens into the extended position, but somehow the hacked firmware ignores the limit switch for the little lens cover door and tries to run it at the same time? Scraaaaape.....
Don't get me wrong, this looks freakin' cool! But to presume there is zero possibility of damage seem naive to me.
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
Well I'm assuming that's just some initial hacks they got working.
What I really want to know is if you can disable the software that prevents the camera from stealing the souls of those photographed. Digital cameras are amazingly convenient and powerful compared to their non-digital ancestors, but they're useless to me unless I can steal souls.
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Because it's physically impossible on an SLR. In an SLR, you have the lens, that then is followed by a mirror. The mirror, in the "down" position, reflects the light from the lens through the prism viewfinder and then to your eye.
When you click the shutter, the mirror flips up (viewfinder goes dark), exposing the shutter which then opens and shuts the right amount of time the actual camera sensor.
That's not to say it's not possible to say, add a little cameraphone like sensor and offer a live preview (several dSLRs do this now), but historically, it wasn't possible. The light is either going to the main camera sensor, or the viewfinder. A small amount is actually reflected *down* for autofocus, though.
Though, as anyone knows, holding your camera at arm's length (so you can use the LCD as a viewfinder) sucks for camera shake. And most camera LCDs are of QVGA or lower resolution, so you miss out on all the nice little details youc an see through a real optical viewfinder like that on a dSLR...
RAW gives you more image information, as you haven't gone through a lossy RAW->JPEG conversion. Whether this is to correct an under/over-exposed picture (or both*), or to compensate for an incorrect (or impossible**) white balance setting.
You're right, a bigger sensor and lens will give you a better picture. But for a given maximum camera size, RAW will give you the potential*** for better images than JPEG. Perfect for an undercover paparazzo who needs to blow up that discreet underexposed celebrity shot to sell to US Magazine.
A decent analogy is that with JPEG you've thrown away the 'negative', and are left with only a print of the image, throwing away the rest of the information contained in the negative. If you really care about the image, or are going to spend hours working with it in photoshop, wouldn't you rather be working with an image taken from the negative, rather than the print?
* example of an under- and over- exposed picture: a person wearing a hat on a sunny day. The outside of the cap can be overexposed, while their face is underexposed. As RAW stores the image with a higher colour bit depth, you've got a chance of recovering the over and under exposed area.
** example of 'impossible' white balance: a room lit by candlelight, which has a window with an overcast sky outside. Either the room will look orange, or the window will look blue, or both- there's no way to make both areas of the picture look correct with one white balance setting. Changing the white balance of one area of the JPEG that radically will throw away masses of information, and look terrible. With RAW, you can render the picture twice with two different white balance values, one for the overcast sky, and one for the candle, and merge the two images together.
*** With a perfectly exposed picture that has the correct colour depth, the only real advantage of RAW is that you avoid the JPEG compression, but with these small sensors you're probably only going to see noise there instead of the compression, so it won't make a lot of difference.
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You're making a video with your phone, when it rings. Unwilling to interrupt your filming, you hit the divert button, redirecting the call to your MP3 player. This annoys your offspring, who were watching a movie on it. To placate them, you tell them to fetch your video camera, which they can use to stream the same movie to your television in higher quality...
Repton.
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