Canon PowerShot SD890 IS and SD850IS compared

Canon has released a lot of new cameras since my last post. Today I'll discuss the SD890, which appears to be an update to the SD850. Like it's predecessor, it has a 2.5" LCD, an optical viewfinder, and image stabilization. The Sd890's major improvement over the older camera is that it features a 5x optical zoom. That's the highest zoom I've heard of in a compact camera. Unfortunately, Canon did have to make the camera slightly larger in every dimension, at 3.8 x 2.3 x 1.1 in (vs 3.6 x 2.2 x 1 in. for the sd850). The SD850 is already about as big as I'm willing to carry around in a pocket, so for my money I'd go for the SD850 instead (which is only $240, vs $350 for the SD890). An interesting side note is that the SD850's price hasn't dropped much from when I bought it, 5 months ago, at $250.

The only other advantage to the SD890 is the shots (CPIA) per charge is better: 320 (vs 240). With the LCD off it goes up to 800!

So far I've only found one review. They found the ergonomics surprisingly poor: not easy to hold, and difficult to navigate between pictures. I hope to put my hands on on one soon, and post my own review. They also found that at the widest setting, the lens was rather distorted, and produced photos with blurry corners (see ttp://www.digitalcamerareview.com/assets/17135.jpg). Given the higher zoom of this lens, it's not surprising, and likely it's worse than for the SD850, though there are not enough sample pics out there to be able to judge this yet. The only real positive I found in this review is that the noise level at ISO 800 is notably better than on the SD850. That's at least something.

Oh, and did I mention that it's a 10 megapixel camera (up from 8MP on the SD850)? But who cares, these days, about the mega pixel rating?

Innovating at the color filter level

As I've discussed before, the way your camera produces color images is by placing a color filter over what is essentially a monochrome sensor. The redness of a particular pixel, for instance, depends on how much light passed through the red filter above the nearest CCD element to that pixel. The big disadvantage is that the filter must discard a lot of the light entering the lens. I never thought about it before, but apparently there exist many different possible color filter layouts, with different advantages and disadvantages.

http://www.quadibloc.com/other/cfaint.htm has some really nice examples of the possible trade-offs.

Hack your PowerShot camera's firmware

I just found this amazing website where several camera enthusiasts have figured out how to hack the firmware for the Canon PowerShot cameras (most cameras from the last few years are supported, and many recent models are supported). The hacks range from the mildly useful, such as live histograms, to the amazing, such as enabling 1/10,000th of a second exposures. Also particularly notable is the added ability to save pictures in RAW mode.

http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

In particular, check out the high-speed photography pictures.

I'm going to try this out my SD850 soon. In the mean time, I encourage PowerShot owners to give it try, as the firmware hacks are non-destructive; you have to enable them each time you turn on the camera, so there's no risk to giving them a try.

Inside the SD110 - 2nd step: the mainboard

(Jump to previous post in series.)

Just like in your computer, the SD110 has a mainboard where most of the logic chips and main CPU are placed. It's quite easy to get to; just pop the outside case off and there it is, under a layer of copper shielding, shown folded back to the left side of the picture. At this stage you can see several interesting features of the camera. First, many of the components are made by other companies, such as the two ICs in view, one from NEC and one from SAMSUNG.
Second, note how many ribbon cables there are on this card. While this may be the mainboard, there are a huge number of axillary boards, which you will see in later pictures. These boards are all attached with ribbon cables, which turn out to be relatively easy to remove and re-insert. Finally, note the ribbon cable on the lower-right, with the many silver dots. While it's not terribly clear, I suspect this is actually a testing port. The idea is that you could slip the whole thing into a connector and interface directly with the camera while it is apart. While this might be for repairmen to diagnose a problem with a camera that has been sent back for repair, another possible use is to test camera components while the whole thing is being assembled.

(jump to the next post in this series)

Download photos from your Canon Powershot under Win2k3

Out of the box, the Canon Powershot software is not not compatible with Windows 2003 Server. But with some tweaking, you can make it work.

First, you need to install SSDP and UPnP services for Win2k3.

Next, make sure that the old Canon software is uninstalled.

Then, set the startup.exe install program on your Canon driver CD to load in WindowsXP compatibility mode. Run setup, and install ZoomBrowser ex, and photo stitch. I've found that version 5.8 does not run well under Win2k3, but that 6.x works fine, so at this point you may need to download and install an updater from Canon's website.

After rebooting, plug your camera in. The Canon software may load automatically. I found that I had to first open the Windows Control Panel for Cameras and Scanners and set Camera Window as the default action when my camera was plugged in.

After doing this the Canon software would load when I connected the camera, but clicking on the download images button did not work. A final step that I had to complete was to open the E:\Program Files\Canon\CameraWindow\CameraWindowDVC6 folder, and set all the EXE files to WindowsXP compatibility mode. I'm not sure this is necessary, since I discovered that some of the files had been set into Win2k compatibility mode from when I had been trying other methods to get the CameraWindow software to work. Win2k mode definitely doesn't work.

After those steps the Canon software works flawlessly. I can download pictures just fine, and all the Canon photo tools work just fine. In the MS event viewer tool, I do see the following, rather ugly message a lot, but I've never seen any actual malfunction:

Generate Activation Context failed for c:\Program Files\Canon\ZoomBrowser EX\Program\MFC80U.DLL. Reference error message: The referenced assembly is not installed on your system.

Canon SD850IS and Win2k3 do not work together

I have recently started using Windows 2003 Server, to avoid having to upgrade to Vista. After installing the drivers and applications for my Canon camera, I get the following error on each bootup:

The Canon Camera Access Library 8 service depends on the following nonexistent service: SSDPSRV

Using regedit I searched for SSDPSRV, and removed this dependency (see thread that suggested this) so that the Camera Access Library would load, but apparently it really does depend on SSDPSRV, or there is another incompatibility with Win2k3. Turning on the camera does load the Windows Image acquisition manager (after I enabled that service), but does not load the Canon tool for downloading images.

UPDATE: there is a workaround.

IrfanView 4.1 released

IrfanView is my favorite image viewer. Here's some of the highlights of this version:

* Lossless JPG Crop added (Menu: Options or Thumbnails (batch mode))
* Support for FLV format (flash video/image).

Get it here: http://www.irfanview.com/

Don't forget to download the plugins as well.