CHDK A Canon PowerShot G7 hacked with CHDC. If you want to try out a hack for fun but afraid of damaging your equipment, get a cheap, used PowerShot to try with CHDK, to get yourself acquainted. While the hacks are stable, there’s no guarantee they’re 100-percent foolproof. These hacks aren’t “illegal,” but they aren’t supported by any of the companies mentioned. Note: Making any unauthorized changes to a product’s original setting is done at your own risk (duh). (Set aside a weekend to study up on the guides before you attempt.) If the inner MacGyver in you is up for some tinkering – and you happen to own a Canon camera, in particular – here are some hacks that will unlock your camera’s hidden potential and add extra value. While cameras are often already loaded with features, software-based hacks can add new shooting capabilities not mentioned in the instruction manual. This image from space was taken by a Canon PowerShot camera hacked with CHDK. And hacking the camera might actually be the easy part, thanks to an open-source firmware update. While it sounds like a complicated science project, it’s actually something many have successfully accomplished (Ho and Muhammad just made theirs unique by sending the little Lego guy with it and, oh, they’re teens). To document the event from liftoff to crash-land, they rigged a basic Canon point-and-shoot camera to continuously snap photos. Last year, two Canadian teenagers, Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, successfully sent a Lego mini figure up into space using a weather balloon as the vehicle. That means Flip is getting hit from three competitive directions: mobile phones on the low end, decent camcorders on the high end, and tens of millions of everyday digital cameras that outperform it on video. More and more mobile phones take video now, too, and can use wifi or cell connectivity to stream the footage to the Internet. There is no way I’m going to drag two devices around when I only need one: The Flip loses.Īnd they have more competition on the way. And the video editing is smooth sailing.Īt the end of the day, my camera has better video features than the Flip, costs about the same, and takes really good pictures, too. But my Canon is pretty darn easy to use, too. Some people will argue that the Flip is dead simple to use, which is true (except when it comes to editing the video). The test video the WSJ did seems to support this, although it was windy in that video. Here’s another problem with the Flip Mino I’ve been hearing – there’s something wrong with the sound. The devices are roughly the same size – the Mino is longer and the Canon is wider and fatter, but they’re very close. But you can also bring spare storage cards for the Canon, you can’t for the Flip.
The Canon, with a $20 2 GB storage card, matches that. The Flip has just 2 GB of storage and 60 minutes of record time. The Canon has 3x optical zoom and 4x digital zoom the Flip has only 2x digital zoom. The Canon has a 3 inch screen, The Flip Mino is 1.5 inches. And the Canon SD750 costs $3.39 less than the Flip Mino.īoth devices record at 640×480. Not only does it take great pictures, it matches or beats the Flip Mino in every category. I now happily use my Canon SD750 for basic video footage ( example is here). Why they do that is beyond me – everyone is moving to Quicktime at this point. This is because Flip insists on encoding video in a proprietary format that iMovie can’t handle directly. The main reason is that it just doesn’t play nice with Macs, and editing video requires a number of extra steps. Canon alone sold nearly 9 million digital cameras last year.Īs I said, I abandoned my Flip Ultra soon after buying it. And nearly 40 million of them sold in 2007. But it happens to be exactly the same resolution as most digital cameras, almost all of which now offer video as well. The Flip’s video quality (640×480) is much lower than most people would expect from a camcorder. Instead everyone focuses on the fact that Flip has sold nearly a million units, saying that’s 15-20% of the camcorder market – and the Flip is a fraction of the price of most of those competitors. None of the reviews compared the Flip to it’s core competition: normal digital cameras.