Camera Zoom hack

Posted on May 20, 2008  •  2 minutes  • 403 words

Recently hack a day  had a article about enhancing your Canon to have more functionality than a standard point and shoot camera. The firmware loads on your memory card and it allows you to do things like shoot in RAW picture format, change your ISO speed, even allow a calendar and games on the camera. One of the best features of the firmware looks like it is completely reversable. All you do is load the files on a memory card and it works (as far as I have read at least). Once you no longer want the extra features you can just delete the files from the memory card.

The most difficult part looks like it is picking the right firmware for your camera. Head over to the CHDK project wiki  page and start reading/downloading.

One other thing I was able to do this weekend was enable a super zoom on my camera. Really this is all I did…

The camera lens fit almost perfectly into the binoculars so I decided to see how well it would work. I noticed at first that I had almost tunnel vision when taking pictures and they were a little bit blurry. I quickly saw that if I zoomed in all the way (3x optical) I lost the tunnel vision. I then was able to adjust the blurriness with the focus on the binoculars.

Here are some before and after pictures of what the pictures looked like.

Even though some of the closeups were pretty blurry I’d imagine you could get a much clearer picture with better binoculars.Let me know if you get to try this on your own and how it works for you.A couple things I found that worked well was making the camera have a fast ISO speed because with the binoculars the picture was very shaky. I turned off picture review so I could just take as many pictures as I possible. If you are buying a set of binoculars you may want to look if your camera fits in the looking hole. It helped because it shielded a lot of the light and made it easy to hold both the camera and still focus the image.

UPDATE: I wanted to update this post with some more information I found out about CHDK. HackADay  had some great tips on using CHDK to its full advantage.

Originally published at 1n73r.net  on May 20, 2008.