Supercharge Your Canon Point and Shoot

[randell]

I came across this article that other day concerning a free hack software that allows you to add/unlock features of many Canon Point and Shoot cameras.

I have a Canon A630, which is compatible with this software.  You basically put the program on your SD card and run it from the new menu item that appears in your camera's menu.  It has some silly utilities like a text file reader and calendar, but it has much more useful features as well - it allows you to shoot in RAW and enables bracketing. 

I have tested these two features (RAW and Bracketing) out and it really does work.  The RAW images are created as CRW (Canon RAW) files, but you can open them in Picassa or use a free converter (mentioned in the FAQs) to convert the CRW to DNG (the universal raw format).  There lot of other capabilities, but I am still delving into them.  One of my favorite features is it puts a battery life indicator on your camera LCD screen, which is very useful.  It can also put a live histogram right on your LCD as you are shooting.

Just something to play with if you are interested and have a Canon P&S.

[presidio]

I came across this article that other day concerning a free hack software that allows you to add/unlock features of many Canon Point and Shoot cameras.

Very useful, thanks for the tip.

[xseption]

Very nice! I will have to investigate my wife's p&s that I got her for Christmas

thanks for the tip!

~ edd

[dkerr24]

Awesome tip!  I installed this hack on my Canon Powershot A540 and it works great.  The CRW files are about 7mb in size each compared to the average size of 3mb for each jpg shot.

The battery meter is a nice bonus, too.