Camera Hacking
It’s long been said that even the most (seemingly) high-tech gadgets aren’t that cutting-edge; most products have only those features their manufacturers have chosen to give them, not those they could have. It’s sad, but an unavoidable side-effect of companies producing so many products that they’re, even within a given market segment, competing with themselves. Choice is good, choice is grand, but making intentionally “crippled” products that you can sell at a lower price-point just seems, well, stupid.
Venerable camera manufacturer Canon are guilty of this; more guilty than most, in fact. Their newer “PowerShot” compact digital cameras boast the DiGiC II or DiGiC III processors - the same clever bits of technology that power their much more expensive line of digital SLRs. Yet, because these are “consumer” cameras, most of the really nifty features of the dSLRs - shooting in raw format being perhaps the biggest example - aren’t available. In automotive terms, this is a bit like giving a Volkswagen Golf a turbocharged V8 - and then a six-speed manual transmission whose fourth, fifth, and sixth gears have been removed. (Hmmn, note to self: Automobile analogies suggest I may have been watching too much Top Gear of late.) In short, the “brains” of a newer PowerShot are capable of considerably more than Canon have chosen to let it do.
That’s where the folks from the CHDK project come in - clever hackers who’ve come up with custom firmware for DiGiC II and III-based cameras that allow them to take full advantage of their silicon powerplants - and in some quite clever instances, allowing them to do things even Canon’s multi-thousand-dollar top-line dSLRs cannot (or, rather, may not) do. Shooting in Raw mode is exciting, if you’re a hardcore photo geek; exposures out to 65 seconds’ duration have rather wider appeal. A stunningly clever use of movement-detection technology to identify - and photograph - lightning strikes is , frankly, incredibly cool, though not something you use everyday. Flash sync at up to 1/20,000 of a second is, really, just showing off… as are functions to sync up two cameras for stereo-photography, support for wired (and wireless, on some models) cable releases… I could go on, but, really, if you’ve got one of these cameras, head on over to the CHDK website, and see what your camera is capable of doing - but which Canon decided it shouldn’t.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.