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View Full Version : Unofficial / Open camera firmwares?



Mr. Picklesworth
May 18th, 2007, 09:12 PM
I recently won a Sony Cybershot DSC-650 camera. (A good entry-level camera, by the way. Unfortunately it uses bloody memory stick format, but I found a MicroSD -> MS Pro Duo converter so that was quickly solved).

It works well for quick photos, but there is one problem with it for me: As someone who has for ages been using a Canon AV-1 (manual, film camera) to do everything, this camera seems very restrictive!
Specifically, I have no control over focus. The only choice is autofocus, and it will only focus on a point right at the center of its view. To focus on anything not at the center, I must trick it to do so in an over-elaborate way.

This seems the sort of thing fixable by a simple change in the camera's firmware, but, of course, we don't have the source code and there is no way Sony will add such a feature (why do that when they can just get people who want autofocus to pay more?).

Thus, an innocent little question: Have there ever been efforts to create open source, homebrew digital camera firmwares? (Even if not for this camera; I'm just curious).
Something like that would be pretty fun to play with!

jariku
May 19th, 2007, 02:04 AM
This is not quite what you're looking for, but I own a Canon EOS 300D digital camera that has almost the same hardware as the EOS 10D, which is for professional users. It is possible to get this functionality with a hacked firmware.

So far I've been using the vanilla firmware, but the added functionality has made me think about changing the firmware.