Tag Archives: canon

Excellent CNET Interview with Canon’s Chuck Westfall

CNET’s Stephan Shankland has an excellent (and lengthy) interview with Canon’s professional products technical advisor Chuck Westfall…

Q&A: Canon helps usher in the video SLR era

Stephen asked a lot of questions. But, the one I was most interested in was about including GPS capability. Westfall waffled on that one. But, it was encouraging that he said it would be sooner rather than later.

Canon’s soon-to-be-released Rebel T1i which is the first Rebel SLR to shoot video (let alone HD video though at “only” 24fps) is the SLR on my wish-list.

Tried RAW Mode for the First Time


I only have one digital camera that can take photos in RAW mode. I bought the camera around 2002 or 2003 (I think) and never used the RAW setting because CF cards were expensive and the biggest card I had was only 256MB (plenty for JPEGs but way to small for RAW). With some time on my hands (day job ended yesterday) and no need to skimp on CF card space, I shot a few photos around my home using the old G3 (4 megapixel) in RAW mode. I’m not sure my old Windows based photo editors could deal with RAW mode. However, the current generation Apple iPhoto works fine with this format.

I’m pretty happy with what I see so far. And, while the RAW files are large, they are not gigantic compared to today’s much higher resolution JPEG images. I may carry this old camera around a bit and shoot more RAW images this week.

CHDK Wiki: How to Hack A Canon PowerShot Digital Camera


I really tempted to try a CHDK Wiki Canon PowerShot digital camera firmware hack. But, a big streak of digital cowardice is getting in the way 🙂 According to their FAQ, the changes are not actually written to the camera in a permanent way. The firmware hack can be reversed by simply removing the flash card with the hack on it. Applying the hacks adds features to some (but not all) Canon PowerShot cameras.