Camera for CHDK?

blanko

Rookie
Hi,
Any thoughts at all on cameras to use with CHDK? I guess what I want is 24mm, 2.8 and affordable. Read cheapskate.
I'm looking to take advantage of turning a cheapo camera into a serious compact.
I'm looking to replace my much loved Ricoh GX100
 
From the list Brian linked, the "serious compacts" are the Canon S90, S95, G7, G9, G10, G11, and G12. I don't recall that any of these have 24mm equivalent lenses. In the cut below, the SX230is has a 24mm equivalent. Some others may as well, but that looks to be one of the newest.
 
Sadly I can't hack my Canon Powershot Elph S200.. guess I am a model too old. What I am going to do is gut it and make it IR.. well.. later but yeah. One of those photograph every part you remove because you will forget where you got them all from. Always a screw left over..
 
Hi.
Sorry, I guess I should've explained what CHDK is, it looks as though some replying don't understand what it does. Basically it adds advanced or serious capabilities to other cameras in the Canon range. Think of it as adding the firmware of the G12 to a Canon point and shoot. It's not that simple, but that's the jist. Raw, P/A/S and maybe even M, plus other fun bits and bobs. It stands for Canon Hack Developers Kit. I should've made myself clear.
 
I was shooting with a Canon A630+CHKD in raw before I bought the Samsung EX1. Raw writing speed per file is about 5-6 second and the pictures was noisy even at 200 iso. It's compactness, rotating display helped me a lot to decide for a serious compact camera but unfortunatly this little camera do not create a miracle.

Sorry for my English
 
From what I have read I may not have to hack.. just remove a filter. Of course I have to get deep into the guts of the camera however documenting what I do, it shouldn't be too hard to put it back together. When I get back from vacation maybe :) Thanks for the link, will check that out too.


Well- IR is a different hack, I did that with my Nikon Coolpix 950. I bought the glass Windows here:

AnchorOptics.com - Supplies affordable, quality commercial grade and experimental grade optics

The thickness needs to be close to the original IR absorbing glass window for the Focus to be maintained.

No need to change out firmware.
 
I'd never heard of this before ... excellent, I'll have a crack at my old IXUS 750 (SD550) ...
Paul, please let us know how you get on...as this idea is intriguing. Of course it has me scanning eBay for these sub-$50 candidates. :blush:

Appreciate your bringing this to the forefront of our attention blanko, and hope others can help....if not I hope you might guide a few folks further forward - and astray ;) - with this serious compact DIY option.

? Is the slow RAW writing speeds, as highlighted by makinist61 - a common side-effect of CHDK or simply down to the age of the camera and the speed of the processor?
 
Downloaded and installed ... you'll need your glasses on if you wear them, there's a zillion options in a multi-paged cascade menu system ... but the nice thing is you can play without affecting your camera's firmware, as the system runs automatically off your SD card (if you're old enough, think of it as booting from floppy rather than hard disk) ... the main thing for me is that it adds the possibility to save as .CRW or .DNG and so do some decent PP work- although my experience with this little old 7.1MP P&S camera is that the jpegs and the "canon colours" are superb anyway ... I shan't spend too much time playing as I've got the E-P2 and a DP2s which I still need to master properly ...

worth a go anyway,
 
hehe maybe I should have made this my SiJ camera!

write times with raw DNG switched on are quicker than the DP2s by the way, but then it's half the pixels innit?
 
hehe maybe I should have made this my SiJ camera!

write times with raw DNG switched on are quicker than the DP2s by the way, but then it's half the pixels innit?

Really? Faster than the DP1. I mean that's not surprising I suppose....but very encouraging. Well depends who you listen to...at 7.1MP that's double the DP1 ;)
 
hmm ... rather misleadingly, although you can produce .crw files, they aren't "really" .crw files ... neither canon s/w not LR will read or process them (though UFRaw will) ... so I shall stick to .dng ... all this is distracting me from a) getting a job and (much more importantly) b) SiJ
 
ok then ... I'd like to try this again when we actually have some light in the sky ... this shot was taken very late afternoon in the middle of a beech clump with auto flash ... remember, this is a 2005 camera with a 7.1MP 1/1.8" sensor ... that's around 6x smaler than a 4/3 sensor ... first, the OOC JPG ...

View attachment 47274
Canon JPEG OOC by _loupe, on Flickr

... and this is the from the DNG with some PP applied ...

View attachment 47275
CHDK DNG PP'd by _loupe, on Flickr

One thing I noticed was the huge amount of chroma noise in the DNG, but rather low levels of luminance noise;, so low in fact that I didn't feel the need to correct it; there was a bit of CA, but easily corrected.
 
A couple more and then I shall cease hijacking blanko's thread!

First, out of camera jpeg using Large/Superfine option for image size ...

6646641299_3c3c4091d4_b.jpg

Bridge January (canon ooc) by _loupe, on Flickr

Now developed from a DNG in LR ...

6646603161_78c3e984e1_b.jpg

Bridge January (canon chdk) by _loupe, on Flickr

Some work could be done to the OOC jpeg to improve contrast a bit; but the detail and sharpness of the grassy bits on, for instance, the little islet nearest the camera have been squished by the in-camera processing (I'm guessing the denoise).

I already have one too many cameras and several too many lenses so I'll put this to one side now, but I'm glad blanko brought this to my attention.

If you have a Canon supported by CHDK it's might really worth playing with; there is s CHDK Flickr group as well.
 
I notice that up in the sky and in the trees there is more definition/contrast. I knew about CHDK, a friend from Germany told me she did it to her camera but again mine was too old for any hacks.
 
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