Canon Powershot A510 Firmware Download
Tethered shooting? Is that some really strande way of saying that you use a cable release?
Tethered to a PC. Most earlier Canon point & shoots could be told to take a shot by a PC connected to the USB port, but somewhere along the line Canon decided this feature should be reserved for the absolute top of the range model. I can't believe maintaining the feature in the cheaper models would have cost them any money - I think it's far more likely that they wanted to make sure that anyone who was that bothered about what Canon perceived as being a relatively advanced feature went out and bought. Hardhack, by definition, is a hardware hack. That would mean, for instance, adding an MCU to the board to gain extra functionality.
This is a firmware change and thus is a software hack. What lotus flower are you people eating?
Actually, it's not a firmware hack, either. Basically it works as follows: When you upgrade firmware in a Canon camera, there is scope to run an application before the firmware upgrade. What CHDK does is trigger the upgrade process, but doesn't upgrade the firmware - it just uses the firmware upgrade routine to run the CHDK code on top of the firmware. The camera still works, and the CHDK code has access to all the camera variables, allowing you to do pretty much anything you want. But the underlying firmware remains unchanged (and thus your warranty isn't void). It's all rather neat, and the CHDK code is easy to hack around with (I've done so in the past). Ouch, before carping about the prefix in someone else's, you should take out the adjective from your own.
Turns out it's not a 'Firmware Change' either anymore than running a bootable linux CD under vmware on your mactop is a firmware hack. What it is - and this is a critical point for warranty concerns, is the ability to /temporarily/ ammend the active program for the duration of a single boot. It does not as you suggest change the firmware, which by definition is the nonvolatile program memory contained in t. 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. 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 correct, but people may, reading it, be under the impression the problem is the JPEG compression. RAW gives you the full bits per pixel available. This can be up to 14 in the recent DSLRs.
Let's assume a P&S can give you 10 bits/pixel. That's two more stops than a standard 8-bit JPEG, even at 'maximum quality'. JPEG compression artifacts aren't the real problem - it's the colour depth available in RAW. So shooting RAW allows you to rescue the highlights and shadows. JPEG compression artifacts are a red herring. Of course, if we used PNG or 16-bit capable JPEG (with full EXIF), then there wouldn't really be this problem.
When you take a RAW image, the only camera settings that you have to worry about are the aperture, the shutter speed, and the ISO setting (of course you still need to focus/autofocus and point the camera in the right direction, etc.). The RAW image is just the data that is coming off the sensor, without any processing. The image sensor, and therefore the RAW data saved from it, can have no concept of 'white balance' - this is a shifting of the colours in the image that takes place in the image processing. Which is mostly useless on a camera with a sensor that small.
You don't understand what RAW is for, do you? Actually, he/she does. I use CHDK, and I can tell you that there's very little extra info in those 10-bit raw files (that's all you get from the Canon P&S line). Remember that a lot of that extra room already goes in whitebalance correction.
You.can. get a bit more non-colour information out of the highlights if you really push it, but really.
I've just gone back to shooting jpegs, mostly. 10-bit RAW files aren't pretty. That said, it's still nice to have the capability, but in the real world it's just not that useful most of the time. What.is. really nice about CHDK are the live histogram capabilities - the live merged RGB histo is outstanding in getting the exposure right (and I don't know of any other P&S camera that provides this capability). Just what everyone in the world was clamoring for: games for their camera. While games are a nice gimmick that gets the project attention, it looks like there are real features here.
Me, after I lost my old Powershot I bought in 2004, I got a new amazon.com. I was unhappy, however, to see that it had even less features than the old Powershot. Instead of trickling whizbang features down into cheaper cameras over time, Canon has been getting rid of them altogether.
Canon Powershot A540 Troubleshoot
Now, one missing feature is hardware, the swivel viewfinder, and I can't do anything to remedy that. Similarly, I cannot use the camera as a webcam with a few hacks like I could the old one.
However, this open firmware project will restore my precious RAW capabilities. It will also give me longer exposure times that I've long craved. Just what everyone in the world was clamoring for: games for their camera. I have had CHDK installed on my A620 for a while now, mainly so that I can use it to do exposure bracketing so that I can take HDR photos automatically (using Photomatix Pro to piece them together).
But - while hanging out at Tahoe with some buddies of mine - we started talking about Nethack. Without saying another word, I clicked on my camera, turned on CHDK Sokoban, and handed it to a friend of mine, who was duly impressed.
Au contraire. Adding RAW support to a camera in which it has been disabled actually gives you fewer knobs to twiddle while shooting. Instead of having to get the dynamic range perfect to avoid clipping when the camera converts the image to JPEG, you get the full dynamic range of the sensor shoved straight to disk. This means that photos that might have been hopelessly washed out before are now salvageable, at least partially freeing you to focus on what matters-the picture itself-instead of having to. (Is there any alternative firmware for the 350D onwards, or have the hackers simply not bothered?) Not that I'm aware of, and I've got a 400D so I'd be interested to know as well.
The main reason there were hardware hacks for the 350D is because it was basically a higher-end camera (can't remember exactly which model - 30D?) in a cheap plastic shell with a crippled firmware. I suspect the differences between the product lines are a touch more pronounced these days - either that or they're checking the firmware at boot to ensure it is correct for the model. I own and frequently use the 300D, and it's pretty obvious to any previous or current owner of this camera that this camera was Canon's experiment into consumer-priced SLRs, as it was nearly feature equivalent to the 10D (the only difference was the buffer size and 0.5 second shutter speed difference). The separation between the Rebels and the double-digit cameras has been widening ever since. A great example is the Canon 400D and 450D.
While they do take stunning pictures and are great SLR cameras in thei. I was OK with Linksys reducing the memory footprint, especially since they introduced the 54GL. I was not enthused they forsake open source firmware (busybox) for closed source VxWorks, and then that Linksys or VxWorks put some checksums in their upload routines that tried to disallow altered firmware. The fact the openWRT people finally overcame the checksums and shoehorned busybox into the gimped 45Gs (while retaining more features than VxWorks) shows it was technically possible. They were just takin. Pretty clear-cut business case.
In their case, they went out of their way to provide the original model again, pretty much just for hackers. They could've just dropped the old version, y'know. For every hacker they retained by keeping the GL, they pissed off two others (like me) who resented being asked to pay $20 more than we had been for the same hardware (or the same price for inferior hardware). Prices on technology are supposed to go down, not up, as the product gets older! Because of that bullshit, I'.
I would tell anyone who'd listen that if you own one of these cheapish but otherwise excellent point-and-shoot cameras (mine is a Canon Powershot A510), if you're looking for a great use for it, consider putting it to use as a Web cam, or a motion detector. I spent quite a bit of time researching this project, and am not affiliated with either company I mention here, nor do I stand to gain from mentioning them. I only cite their names here b/c I was looking for a cheap way to get good quality, auto-recorde. 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. I have long been aware of CHDK, and own one of the cameras that was recently added to their 'list'. I got as far as downloading the file and trying to make head or tail of the 'intructions'.
Not even the worst offending Microsoft 'undocumented' feature you can think of is this badly documented. There is NO step by step guide that makes you feel confident at all about loading this onto your camera. Yes there are steps - more like leaps off the edge of the Grand Canyon! Huge gaps of logic, no fin. 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? Don't get me wrong, this looks freakin' cool! But to presume there is zero possibility of damage seem naive to me.
Even with the clearer guide from lifehacker, this still leaves a few issues open: (i) its a HACK and if Canon smell it, bang goes thy warranty; (ii) CHDK are from/in Russia - genius programmers, but nationally a poor track record on the TRUST aspect. The first one is addressed wikia.com on the site. And sorry, but I can't help you with your xenophobia.
I've used CHDK on my A710IS for about six months with zero problems. As many others have mentioned, it's incredibly easy to disable it, but the features that it adds are very handy. What exactly was hard about the instructions? When I first found out about CHDK I had it running on my camera.3 minutes. after the download completed. All you do is: 1) copy the files to your flash card 2) Power up the camera in playback mode while holding the menu button to add the firmware update option to the menu. This is something you should already know how to do from the cameras manual!
3) Select the update. Once the files are on the flash card you can repeat this process at any time in under 15 seconds. If you want to use the stock firmware then you just don't run the update.
The custom firmware has all kinds of neat features. If you like making HDR pics, you can use available scripts or write your own to bracket the exposures. My Powershot A620 now has the ability to shoot RAW thanks to CHDK. Some builds even incorporate face detection and motion detection. Screw webcams, how about having a 7 megapixel camera capturing what's happening outside your window. Time lapse photography is now a cinch, as are all kinds of things that the stock camera doesn't do.
I never found any of the features to be all that hackerish. They don't document using a histogram, sure. But if you're downloading a firmware for the use of a histogram, you probably already know what one is! 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! The headline makes it sound (unintentionally) like Canons are crap, but actually they make some of the finest point-and-shoot cameras out there.
I have an old Powershot A530 that, despite having 'only' 5 megapixels, take beautiful sharp photographs, either in manual or auto mode, and holds it own when compared to newer cameras. Anyway, i'm so downloading this.
Sounds like a. Or maybe you don't have enough imagination. Why not lock the mirror up with the shutter open (thus exposing the CCD), then when the button is pressed, close the shutter, start exposing, open the shutter, expose, close the shutter, stop exposure, then open the shutter again. Because holding up the mirror for that long uses a lot of power. Doing it on every shot would decrease your battery life by at least 50%. Don't forget about light leaking in through the finder, either. On a DSL in bright conditions, this is a non-trivial limitation.
Be my guest if you want to cover the finder every time you shoot. And wear your mirror action up twice as fast, too. And for a feature which can be accurately deduced through the meter. Digital has brought out many interesting habits in new-to-photography digital photographers. I can meter a scene at least as well as any DSLR with a 1 degree spotmeter - what makes people think they need a 256 level graph to meter a scene is beyond me, but you know, I also shoot 4x5 film, so I tend to think carefully before shooting and look at the scene before shooting - not a bar graph. The shutter speed is limited to the shutter servo - they put settings so that it will work without prodcution tolerances.
While it might be posiable to make it faster it wouldn't be reliable Actually, don't the shutter blades always fall at the same speed? Their speed is the flash sync, the fastest speed where the whole film is exposed at a single point in time, right? Then to set the 'shutter speed', the time between the first shutter blade and the second shutter blade is changed. At least, that is how wikipedia.org work. Leaf shutters are different. I could be totally wrong here, but I was under the impression that digital cameras don't even have a shutter. My thinking is something along the lines of a traditional film camera uses a shutter to maintain complete darkness on the film to prevetn the chemical reactions which take place upon exposure to light and the the shutter opening is able to regulate the photo-chemical reaction by limiting exposure.
Canon Powershot A510 Firmware Upgrade
However a digital camera has a sensor which doesn't rely on absolute dark to prevent exposure. I could be totally wrong here, but I was under the impression that digital cameras don't even have a shutter. I don't actually know about point-and-shoots (I assume they don't have conventional shutters, what with all the live-preview stuff) - but digital SLRs most definitely do.
Actually, the best way to imagine a dSLR is as a film SLR, but with an image sensor taking the place of the film. The half-silvered, hinged mirror is still there for the viewfinder, as is the autofocus and metering gubbins arranged b. You are mostly correct. On Canon SLRs the shutter blades travel as you describe. As the shutter speed gets faster, the delay between when the first/front curtain fires and the second/rear curtain fires gets shorter and shorter.
At shutter speeds faster than X-sync (fastest shutter speed usable with flash), both curtains can be moving at the same time leaving a narrow slit between them. The width of that moving slit is effectively the shutter speed.
The curtains always move at the same speed, just the del. That always puzzles me - a consumer camera like a Nikon Coolpix allows you to see the final image through the LCD (even with zoom), while Digital SLR's, costing several thousands of pounds always switch the LCD off when a picture is about to be taken.
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. Adobe have been attempting to remedy this with their dng raw format (Digital NeGative).
Its a good idea, but I haven't noticed it getting anywhere really - I don't know of any cameras that take dng natively (although most slr's raw format can be converted to it), and equally I don't know of any programs which support dng which can't also read the other raw formats, making it only really useful if you have multiple cameras which take different raw formats and you want to store them all in the same format (n. RAW photos are a standard that are used in some photo contests. Isn't 'RAW' really just an umbrella term for a number of competing and very ad-hoc formats? Original post should have referred to 'lossless' instead of RAW, but, even following that, how complicated could RAW be? You've got RGB information in some order uniform order and bit-depth in sequence from one corner of a picture to another. Trying it once will instantly reveal each component's bit-depth, order of the colors (maybe BGR like most LCDs?), top-left-to-bottom-right versus bottom-left-to-top-right.
Hell, the fanciest it might get is some header with EXIF information (easily stands out from open.