hacking my camera with CHDK
Aug. 20th, 2011 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amezriAbout a year ago I bought a Canon PowerShot SX20IS. It was supposed to be an upgrade to my S3IS.
I fraking hate this camera. Photos are noisy. It's practically unusable at 400ISO. Autofocus is crap. Shutter speed is slow as all hell for continuous shots. Terrible. I've been using it, though, and the pictures I took last year at DragonCon are all sort of.. meh. Soft, not in focus, noisy. I might as well have brought my Sony Cyber-Shot and not worried about the zoom.
While looking to see about a frimware update (there isn't one, BTW), I stumbled on CHDK - Canon Hack Development Kit. I was initially hesitant to install it - it could brick my camera! But then I though, well, I'm not liking this thing anyway, so whatever. Besides, my model has to boot from an SD card, so I'm not actually dumping firmware onto the camera itself - why not?
It took about an hour this morning to get it all on the card. I couldn't figure out how to format to FAT16 with Windows 7, but that was okay because CardTricks will do that and make the SD card bootable for you. You need a card that's under 4GB, though. I have two, so it's not a problem.
There are a TON of features you can enable with CHDK, including shooting in RAW mode - apparently the SX20IS is capable of it, but Canon disabled the feature in software for whatever reason. You can get it back with this. I don't really care that much about RAW, however, so the only thing I've enabled immediately is Super Fine compression. I'd heard that the camera's native compression is what was causing all the noise, so I took some test shots. Here are two of them (click for larger):
Both of these shots were taken with the following settings: 800ISO, 1/8 shutter, f/5. The one with CHDK was ~38mm and the one without was ~35mm. With CHDK, the file size was 2.91MB and without, it was 1.62MB.
There isn't a huge difference - just that some smaller details look sharper. Here are side-by-side comparisons:
view full size
view full size
And closer look at the details cut from full resolution. You'll see that there's a bit more detail int hat yellow swirl on the first picture and the hair is definitely sharper with CHDK.
I'll have to play with many numerous settings some more, but overall, I'm liking just this one improvement! Hopefully this year's DragonCon photos will be less annoying. I don't think there's a setting to fix the focusing problem, so I might just be sticking with manual focus again.
I fraking hate this camera. Photos are noisy. It's practically unusable at 400ISO. Autofocus is crap. Shutter speed is slow as all hell for continuous shots. Terrible. I've been using it, though, and the pictures I took last year at DragonCon are all sort of.. meh. Soft, not in focus, noisy. I might as well have brought my Sony Cyber-Shot and not worried about the zoom.
While looking to see about a frimware update (there isn't one, BTW), I stumbled on CHDK - Canon Hack Development Kit. I was initially hesitant to install it - it could brick my camera! But then I though, well, I'm not liking this thing anyway, so whatever. Besides, my model has to boot from an SD card, so I'm not actually dumping firmware onto the camera itself - why not?
It took about an hour this morning to get it all on the card. I couldn't figure out how to format to FAT16 with Windows 7, but that was okay because CardTricks will do that and make the SD card bootable for you. You need a card that's under 4GB, though. I have two, so it's not a problem.
There are a TON of features you can enable with CHDK, including shooting in RAW mode - apparently the SX20IS is capable of it, but Canon disabled the feature in software for whatever reason. You can get it back with this. I don't really care that much about RAW, however, so the only thing I've enabled immediately is Super Fine compression. I'd heard that the camera's native compression is what was causing all the noise, so I took some test shots. Here are two of them (click for larger):
without CHDK:
with CHDK:
with CHDK:
Both of these shots were taken with the following settings: 800ISO, 1/8 shutter, f/5. The one with CHDK was ~38mm and the one without was ~35mm. With CHDK, the file size was 2.91MB and without, it was 1.62MB.
There isn't a huge difference - just that some smaller details look sharper. Here are side-by-side comparisons:
view full size
view full size
And closer look at the details cut from full resolution. You'll see that there's a bit more detail int hat yellow swirl on the first picture and the hair is definitely sharper with CHDK.
I'll have to play with many numerous settings some more, but overall, I'm liking just this one improvement! Hopefully this year's DragonCon photos will be less annoying. I don't think there's a setting to fix the focusing problem, so I might just be sticking with manual focus again.
