Just Can't leave well enough alone
I've been eyeballing a replacement for my aging P&S digital camera for a while now. I wanted something small enough to go into the pouch on the gas tank of my bike, so that I can capture those excellent panoramic vistas while exploring the great virginia countryside. I didn't however want something that was featureless with tiny buttons and stupid menus. I liked my old PowerShot S50's mix of automatic shooting modes and "manual" controls. I don't know how "manual" the controls are, but they approximate the shutter and aperture of a DSLR well enough.
I settled on the Powershot SX110IS. It might as well be the exact same thing, only cooler, more powerful and sleeker. It's got a bigger screen, four times the resolution, better video shooting modes and overall just a better piece of kit. Plus it doesn't have the shutter door that is the achilles heel of the camera it is replacing.
Anyways, I got it home and before I even took one "real" picture with it, I installed CHDK on it. It's a firmware augmentation for some Canon cameras… sort of like God Mode in Doom. It lets you take pictures from 65" to 1/50,000" , ISO values up to 10k, all kinds of crazy stuff. It even allows for RAW shooting, which is nice because this camera inexplicably doesn't offer a raw mode. Currently I've set it up to allow optical zooming during video recording (most likely disabled because of the horrendous noice the lens makes while zooming), also to display a live histogram while framing and shooting, which I'll probably turn off soon because I don't really use them till post processing, but it's nice to know it's there. The raw mode turns out not to work with Photoshop, but there are options to distill the file inside the camera. Till I can get it figured out I'll just leave it off.
The great thing about CHDK is that it's just an augmentation, an overlay, so I don't have to use it all the time, and it doesn't alter the camera or the firmware. I can turn it off just by unlocking the SD card.
Oh and the best part about all of this is the price. Normally this camera sells for $250 in stores, about $220 online. I found it at Staples on clearance for $179. That's right, $70 off sticker. That made it a good enough deal not to be able to pass up.
I settled on the Powershot SX110IS. It might as well be the exact same thing, only cooler, more powerful and sleeker. It's got a bigger screen, four times the resolution, better video shooting modes and overall just a better piece of kit. Plus it doesn't have the shutter door that is the achilles heel of the camera it is replacing.
Anyways, I got it home and before I even took one "real" picture with it, I installed CHDK on it. It's a firmware augmentation for some Canon cameras… sort of like God Mode in Doom. It lets you take pictures from 65" to 1/50,000" , ISO values up to 10k, all kinds of crazy stuff. It even allows for RAW shooting, which is nice because this camera inexplicably doesn't offer a raw mode. Currently I've set it up to allow optical zooming during video recording (most likely disabled because of the horrendous noice the lens makes while zooming), also to display a live histogram while framing and shooting, which I'll probably turn off soon because I don't really use them till post processing, but it's nice to know it's there. The raw mode turns out not to work with Photoshop, but there are options to distill the file inside the camera. Till I can get it figured out I'll just leave it off.
The great thing about CHDK is that it's just an augmentation, an overlay, so I don't have to use it all the time, and it doesn't alter the camera or the firmware. I can turn it off just by unlocking the SD card.
Oh and the best part about all of this is the price. Normally this camera sells for $250 in stores, about $220 online. I found it at Staples on clearance for $179. That's right, $70 off sticker. That made it a good enough deal not to be able to pass up.