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How-To: Hack Your Canon PowerShot Digital Camera

Norman Chan — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:37 -0500

We love point-and-shoot pocket cameras for their small size and ease of use, but we lament their relatively paltry feature sets when compared to more expensive DSLR models. The good news, for owners of the popular Canon PowerShot cameras, is that your consumer-grade gadget can be upgraded with custom software to endow it with professional features like RAW image recording and live histogram feedback. CHDK (Canon Hack Development Kit) is an easy-to-install software package created by a savvy group of programmers to supercharge the Canon PowerShot. We show you how to safely install and configure this free firmware add-on with no risk to your camera.

Find the Right Software

Download the version of CHDK software that’s appropriate for your Canon PowerShot. CHDK only works with a camera using Canon’s Digic II or newer image sensor—any PowerShot made after 2005 should work. To find the right download, you’ll have to first find your existing firmware version number. Using Notepad or any other text-editing tool, create and save an empty file named ver.req. You’ll have to disable the “Hide extensions for known file types” setting under Windows Explorer’s Folder Options in order to change the file extension to .req.

Using a USB card reader, drop this file into the root directory of your SD card (not while the card is in the camera). Put the card back in your camera, turn on the camera under playback mode, and press the “set” and “disp.” buttons together. If done properly, the camera should display the firmware version number, i.e., Firmware Ver GM1.00C.

Next, head over to the CHDK download site and find your camera model and firmware version. Download the corresponding Zip file under the column labeled Complete.

Load CHDK

With your SD card back in a card reader and connected to your PC, extract the entire contents of the software package into the root directory of the card. Now you’re ready to run the CHDK software. Put the card back in your camera again and turn on your camera under playback mode (the lens should be retracted). Hit the Menu button, and scroll down to the bottom of the first menu tab. You should see an option for “firm update.” Select this and choose Yes when prompted. This is an entirely safe process since CHDK installs additional software instead of replacing the existing firmware in your camera.

CHDK should automatically load in a few seconds and display its logo. You can now switch the camera to capture mode to begin using the new features. Keep in mind that since your core firmware hasn’t actually been modified, CHDK will be disabled every time you turn off your camera, and you’ll have to manually enable it with every boot. We’ll go over how to make CHDK automatically boot later.

Configure the New Features

The first thing you’ll notice with CHDK enabled is that the onscreen display (OSD) shows new information, including the remaining battery life as a percentage, focus distance in meters, and a digital clock.

To enter the special CHDK menu, you need to enter Alt mode by pressing the Shortcut button on your camera (this button is later configurable). When in Alt mode, you’ll see an <ALT> indicator at the bottom of the OSD. Pressing the Menu button will bring up the CHDK menu, where you can enable a live histogram, zebra stripes (to indicate overexposure), and turn on RAW recording mode. The available feature set depends on your PowerShot model, so check the official CHDK wiki for more information.

Boot CHDK at Startup

If you don’t want to manually load CHDK every time you use your camera, you can set it to auto-load, as long as your SD card is smaller than 2GB and not formatted for FAT32 (most aren’t by default). From the same Zip file you downloaded earlier, copy the PS.fir and DISKBOOT.bin files to the root directory of your SD card. Enter the CHDK menu using Alt mode and navigate to Miscellaneous Stuff. Select “Make Card Bootable” and hit the set button. Take out the SD card and slide its physical locking mechanism into the “lock” position. The next time you turn on the camera, CHDK should automatically start up as well.

How to Buy an SD Card for Your Digital Camera

Gordon Mah Ung — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

There’s possibly nothing more confusing than trying to buy a new SDHC card. Do you buy Class 2 or Class 6. Do you care about the “X” rating and should you pay for spring for a premium card? Frankly, even geeks can get confused when faced with a selection of 14 different SDHC cards of varying sizes and ratings – none of which readily make sense. Fear not, we waded through the specs and grabbed a selection of cards for testing to see what really matters.

Classless Society

First up is the most confusing and possibly useless rating system I’ve seen in a while. You’ll recognize these on the face of the SDHC card with the typical Class 2, Class 4, or Class 6 designation. This is nothing more than a designation for what the minimum write speed is for a card. A Class 2 card guarantees a minimum write speed of at least 2MB/s. A Class 4 guarantees 4MB/s and Class 6 means writes of 6MB/s a second. The new Class 10 cards (which are not quite on the market yet) would support minimum writes of 10MB/s.

The class rating was created to help the camcorder makers shoot for a minimum speed for their AVCHD cams. The current AVCHD specs maxes out at H264 High-Profile at 24Mb/s. That pretty much makes anything beyond a Class 4 (4MB/s or 32Mb/s) overkill for any current AVCHD cam. In fact, many AVCHD cameras still haven’t even adopted the higher quality profiles and are still down at 17Mb/s bit rates -- something most Class 2 cards (16Mb/s) can support.

This is my primary problem (and Sandisk’s which has recently been going public with its displeasure over the Class rating). It doesn’t serve the primary audience of SD card users: still photographers. Since it’s pretty clear that anything above Class 4 is overkill for AVCHD, what about still photographers?

That’s where the X-rating or pure write speeds can make the difference between sitting there waiting for the light to stop blinking and getting the shot of a lifetime.

X-Rated

The X-rating is nothing more than a write-speed strangely based on the old read speed of CD-ROM drives. So, 1X is 150KB/s. A Class 2 card equals writes of 13x, a Class 4 equals 26x and Class 6 is 40x. Some manufacturers such as Sandisk, simply skip the X rating, and express write speed in the most plain language that nerds can understand: MB/s. The company’s Extreme III SDHC cards, for example, are rated at 30MB/s. Again, that’s the disconnect that will confuse buyers: a high-performance card that writes at 30MB/s will carry the same Class 6 designation as a card that writes at possibly only 6MB/s.

The Tests

For our tests, we obtained three 8GB Kingston SDHC cards each rated at either 2, 4 or 6. We also looked at a Class 6 Sandisk Extreme III 8GB card as well a Verbatim 16GB Premium Class 6 card that’s rated at 60x writes or roughly 9MB/s. Our first test involved using a Canon Rebel T1i to first shoot video at 1080P and 720P modes. The camera does not write to AVCHD, instead it writes H.264 in .MOV container files with a monotrack audio. It’s no surprise, but every card had no issues with the video mode.

For our still image tests, we had no such expectation. To maximize the file size, we shot at the highest rated ISO of the body (12800) and in RAW mode. We also shot with a fixed white-balance, shutter speed, aperture and with auto focus off. We shot until the camera’s buffer was full and then timed how long it took to write those nine 22.7MB files to the memory card.
The results were not exactly what we expected. First, on the predictable front – the Sandisk Extreme III premium pricing bought us premium performance. The Rebel T1i’s Digic IV CPU took but 10 seconds to write the roughly 159MB of data to the card. That’s half the time of the majority of the other cards here such as the 16GB Verbatim Class 6 card and the 8GB Kingston Class 6 card.

Now for the interesting part. The worst performance was not the Class 2-rated 8GB Kingston card, it was the Class 4-rated 8GB Kingston card. The lowly Class 2 Kingston card turned in the same write performance as the Class 6 8GB Kingston card and the 16GB Verbatim Class 6 card. That dog slow Class 4 8GB card though, took 30 seconds to clear the buffer. Woof.

Our second round of tests measured how long it takes to copy the file from the card to a backup device. For that, we used the highly rated and incredibly fast Nexto Extreme portable backup device that we reviewed in our September issue. To hopefully increase the performance of the Nexto Extreme even more, we removed the 5,400 RPM Fujitsu 160GB hard drive and installed a Corsair P256 256GB SSD. This SSD features write speeds in excess of 100MB/s. The test file was a single 4GB video file captured on the Rebel T1i.

The results were again quite interesting. For the most part, we saw very little difference between all five cards. The previously dog-slow Class 4 Kingston card was actually the fastest by a hair. The Sandisk Extreme III was a close second with the 16GB Verbatim and the Class 2 and Class 6 Kingston cards coming in next. The takeaway here is not to worry too much about reading from the cards as there seems to be fairly insignificant differences between them to care. Certainly, card readers can impact the but we’re not too worried about how long it takes you sitting at your desk to copy the photos.
A final test was performed with the slowest card and the fastest card using old equipment. We took a Canon PowerShot SD950 IS, set it to its highest ISO and shot continuous frames and measured how long it would take to record the images.

The Sandisk Extreme III could shoot 15 images at 1600 ISO in 31 seconds. That previously dog slow Class 4 Kingston card? Just 34 seconds. At lower ISOs of 100 with a resulting smaller file, it took the Sandisk Extreme III 17 seconds to shoot 25 images while the Class 4 Kingston took 21 seconds. The upshot is don’t pay for pricey performance cards if your camera can’t use it. It is no different than putting super unleaded into your Toyota Yaris – you’re just giving Exxon mo’ money.

	Kingston	Kingston	Kingston	Sandisk Extreme III	Verbatim Premium SDHC 60x
Capacity	8GB	8GB	8GB	8GB	16GB
Class	2	4	6	6	6
X-Rating	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	60x write/133x read
Speed Rating	n/a	n/a	n/a	30MB/s	n/a
Time to Write 9 22.7MB RAW Files	20	30	20	10	19
Time to Copy 4GB.MOV file to Nexto Extreme w/ Corsair P256	4:08	3:47	4:09	3:49	3:57

Buying an SD Card for Video

If your primary focus is video for AVCHD you don’t need to pay for anything more than Class 4. Again, any Class 4 card will easily surpass a 32Mb/s write speed. Since AVCHD tops out at 24Mb/s, anything else is wasting your money. It’s better to have a bigger, slower card (but more than fast enough for your video camera), than a faster, smaller card for consumer AVCHD.

Buying an SD Card for Still Imaging

Buy what your camera can shoot or what you intend to upgrade to. It’s clear that the high performance Sandisk Extreme III SDHC is the king of the hill for performance and if you have a modern DSLR such as Canon’s Digital Rebel T1i or Nikon’s D5000 or even the older Nikon D90, paying for the fastest card you can afford will pay dividends in how fast you can shoot images, especially if you shoot in RAW mode.

However, that doesn’t mean everyone with a digital camera should pay the premium pricing for a high speed card. Our tests with the two-year old PowerShot SD950 SI bear this out: even the slowest card in the round up turned in reasonable performance compared to the premium card. Only those with the newest cameras with faster CPUs (or those with an eye toward soon getting one) need invest in premium cards. For those, a card in the 60x to 100x will find reasonable performance for the price.

Which Digital Cameras Are Best? Ask J.D. Power and Associates

Mark Edward Soper — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:44:45 -0500

J.D. Power and Associates have announced the results of their 2008 Digital Camera Usage and Satisfaction Survey, and the winners include:

Digital SLR cameras: Canon EOS Digital and Nikon D-Series (tie); Olympus, Pentax, and Sony scored way behind the leaders. Canon EOS led in picture quality, while Nikon led in performance and operation.
Point-and-Shoot cameras: in a crowded field, the Fujifilm Finepix S series was the winner, but not far behind were the Kodak M, V, and Z series, the Olympus Stylus series, the HP Photosmart R series, the Samsung S series, and the Sony Cyber-Shot S Series.
Premium Point-and-Shoot cameras: Another tie, between Canon PowerShot G series and Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ series. In second place, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ series.
Ultra-Slim cameras: the Sony Cyber-Shot T series was the winner here, with a three-way tie for second place between the Sony Cyber-Shot W series, the Casio Exilim Zoom series, and the Fujifilm Finepix Z series.

Each camera in the survey was judges on five criteria: overall rating, picture quality, performance, operation, and apperance.

One frustration for serious camera shoppers is the lack of model-specific information, but given the frequent turnover in camera models, perhaps the J.D. Power and Associates method of evaluating by series is the best way.

The survey was conducted between April 2007 and March 2008, and was based on responses from more than 8,000 consumers. See the press release for more information. For more information about J.D. Power and Associates, see their website.

What say you? Do you agree with J.D. Power and Associates ratings for your camera, or do you think they missed the boat? Click away and give us your comments.

Konica Minolta Dimage X1

Steve Klett — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 14:38:46 -0600

The X1 makes it clear that Konica is well aware of our penchant to gravitate toward, hold, and purchase shiny objects. However, unless you care little about performance and getting the highest-quality images possible for your dollar, there are better options available.

The X1 looks great on paper: It’s the first compact camera with folded optics to sport an 8-megapixel CCD and anti-shake technology. The anti-shake mode kicks in automatically when hand movement is detected, adjusting the lens accordingly. It’s effective; we’d rather have it than not. It’s particularly useful in low light and when shooting video—a slick indicator light comes on to let you know when anti-shake is on.

The smooth, metallic body is comfortable to hold, and the buttons are well-placed for easy use. We especially like that you can customize the functions of the four-way controller on the back of the camera.

Unfortunately, while the body finish looks nice, it’s impractical. It’s prone to fingerprints, and is highly reflective—so much so that shots can be difficult to compose outdoors in direct sunlight (there’s no optical viewfinder, so you must use the LCD). To make matters worse, the LCD display is very grainy, which makes it hard to tell if your snaps are correctly exposed in the field.

All of this might be forgivable if the X1’s image quality was tip-top, but it’s average at best. Noise was more prevalent overall than with other competitive cameras we’ve tested—and its fastest ISO speed is a lowly 200. Outdoor shots tended to be well-exposed with good color saturation, but just not as sharp or vibrant as other compacts we’ve tested lately, such as Canon’s SD500.

Also, the X1’s a pretty sluggish performer: Lag time between shots at the highest resolution was a bit more than three seconds, which is below average. Video quality was also average and capped at 20fps—30fps is becoming the norm these days.

Indeed, once you get past the X1’s looks, there’s not much to warrant a recommendation, given the performance of its competitors.

Month Reviewed: March 2006

Verdict: 5

URL: www.konicaminolta.us

Canon EOS 5D

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 16:34:45 -0600

Look into the viewfinder of a consumer-grade digital SLR and you’ll notice a startling difference compared with a film camera and the same lens: Your view is cropped, in much the same way black bars crop a widescreen movie to fit an older TV.

Those black bars are gone with Canon’s breakthrough 12.8MP EOS 5D camera, the first semi-affordable full-frame digital SLR. Peer through the beautifully bright viewfinder of the 5D and you’ll be stunned by how much of the image you’ve been missing with your run-of-the-mill SLR.

That “black bar” effect is due to the size of the camera’s image sensor. While a normal frame of film is roughly 36x24mm in size, the average consumer digital SLR, such as Canon’s EOS 20D or Rebel XT, features a sensor that’s about 22.5x15mm. The smaller sensors in these cameras, in effect, turn a “normal” 50mm lens into an 80mm telephoto. An ultra-wide angle 20mm lens is equivalent to an average 32mm lens.

Why doesn’t everybody use a full-frame sensor? The problem is cost. The larger the sensor, the lower the yield. The lower the yield, the more it costs. That’s the breakthrough with the 5D. While a $3,300 street price sounds steep, the company’s first full-frame camera cost $8,000 in 2003.

To lower the price, Canon cut out pro features such as weather resistance and a more advanced auto-focus system. That doesn’t mean the 5D is a featherweight that’ll short out on a humid day. In fact, the magnesium alloy body feels more solid than the EOS 20D body and should survive light rains or mist just fine. Just don’t expect to cover a hurricane with it.

Even without pro-level auto focus, the 5D is still improved over the 20D. Focus response is snappy and accurate, even in low-light conditions. We also like the diminutive size of the 5D compared with the huge pro bodies that scream “rob me at knife point, please.” Given its three-frames-per-second capture rate, the 5D isn’t intended as a sports camera, but its deep buffer of 60 JPEG or 17 RAW files, and fast write times to Compact Flash cards mean you’ll likely never wait for a shot.

We compared the 12.8MP 5D to an 8.2MP EOS 20D and Nikon’s 12.4MP Nikon D2X. In low-light conditions, the 5D’s high ISO performance is stunning. At 1600 ISO, it outclasses the 20D, which was the previous benchmark for low noise, or “grain.” Thanks to improved noise algorithms, and a sensor that isn’t as crowded with pixels as the smaller sensors in the D2X and 20D, the 5D is the new camera to beat for low-light photography. In resolution, as expected, there’s no discernible difference between the D2X and the 5D, but both offer a bit more detail than the 20D’s 8.2MP.

Is the 5D right for you? As any photographer will tell you, a camera is just a tool, and you pick the right tool for the job. The 5D is the tool for landscape, wedding, studio, or street photography, but not the best tool for sports or action shoots.
We give Canon kudos for getting a full-frame sensor into the hands of serious amateurs, but Canon isn’t demonstrating the zany, out-of-the-box thinking that Nikon has with its D2X, which features an even more “cropped” mode to increase the frame rate from 5fps to 8fps at the cost of resolution.

Still, hold the 5D up to your eyeball, and you’ll have a hard time looking through the viewfinder of a cropped camera again.

Month Reviewed: February 2006

+ Henri Cartier-Besson: Butter-smooth images in low light, no crop factor, and a huge LCD.

- Carter Country: Soft-touch shutter release feels mush; skimpy viewfinder info.

Verdict: 9

URL: www.canonusa.com