Canon compacts with DIGIC II or III processors have more capabilities than appear on their menus. Functions such as high-speed shutter and RAW mode can be unlocked using firmware available via the CHDK project (Canon Hacker's Development Kit). WIRED Magazine helped shine a light on this work with their recent article, Supercharge Your Camera with Open-Source CHDK Firmware. It's a terrific overview piece with lots of links, and I suggest you start there if interested in this project.
I have a Canon SD700 IS that I'm going hack. It's a wonderful little camera that I use primarily for underwater because I have a matching housing for it. I want to be able to capture in RAW while snorkeling, and CDDK seems like the way to go.
Of course, anyone trying this does so at their own risk. But if you've tested CHDK, please post a comment and let us know how it went. And if you're interested in trying it, here's a list of cameras.
Technorati Tags: Canon, Derrick Story, digital photography, Technology, The Digital Story, CHDK
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Posted by dstory on April 11, 2008
| Comments (5)
Comments
I just got CHDK running on my SD700. It was as simple as dropping the files on my SD card and loading the program via the Firmware update method. After spending some time configuring the program I setup the camera to load it automatically on start up as described in the CHDK FAQ. I haven't yet tried processing RAW files from it, but the live histogram and Tv bracketing (for HDR) are great.
Commented by: David Philips at May 16, 2008 05:09 AM
I spent a while looking at this about a month ago and initially got very excited about it. However, the apparent answer to John's question about software support turned out to be the show-stopper for me.
First up, I'm using Mac OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) - as opposed to any flavour of Windows or Linux. As far as I could make out, nothing will "natively" read these CHDK RAW files. It looks as if the way forward would be to use Adobe's RAW-to-DNG conversion tool and then import/process the DNG files in Aperture/LightRoom/Photoshop. However, while there appear to be (if I remember correctly) two Windows utilities which will do the initial DNG conversion, there's currently nothing for the Mac. I'm not saying that somebody couldn't put it together (in fact, I seem to recall that at least one of the Windows utilities was open source), but it was beyond my abilities.
Commented by: Gary at April 13, 2008 08:00 AM
I tried to do this with my SD700, but couldn't get
it to work.
After downloading the files and copying them to my SD card, I put the card in the camera and the Firmware update that was supposed to show up in the View menu wasn't there.
I tried it on 3 different SD cards. Not sure what I'm doing wrong.
Commented by: Art Cooley at April 11, 2008 05:21 PM
Very cool but… Is there any software that will support these files? Camera Raw/PShop? Aperture?
And the Hi ISO files on my SD700 IS sure wouldn't encourage me to push it higher.
Hoping someone will post an answer. It would be fun to do more with RAW files from these really fun cameras.
Commented by: John Mather at April 11, 2008 03:21 PM
I just got CHDK running on my SD700. It was as simple as dropping the files on my SD card and loading the program via the Firmware update method. After spending some time configuring the program I setup the camera to load it automatically on start up as described in the CHDK FAQ. I haven't yet tried processing RAW files from it, but the live histogram and Tv bracketing (for HDR) are great.
Commented by: David Philips at May 16, 2008 05:09 AM