Make A Point-and-shoot See Infrared Light

[Daniel Reetz] has caught the Kinect hacking fever. But he needs one important tool for his work; a camera that can see infrared light. This shouldn’t be hard to accomplish, as the sensors in digital cameras are more than capable of this task, but it requires the removal of an infrared filter. In [Daniel’s] case he disassembled a Canon Powershot to get at that filter. There’s a lot packed into those point-and-shoot camera bodies and his teardown images tell that tale. He also ended up with extra parts after putting it back together but that didn’t seem to do any harm.

After the break you can see video that shows the Kinect’s speckled IR grid, which is why he needed IR sensing in the first place. But there’s also some interesting photos at the bottom of his post showing the effect achieved in outdoor photography by removing the filter.

The flash never made it back in the camera. That’d be a perfect place for an IR light source. You’d end up with a night-vision camera that way.

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Classic Canon AE-1 Gets A Digital Upgrade

Shots of this Canon AE-1 camera-gone-digital have a lot of people scratching their heads. Originally there were a lot of “that’s been photoshopped” cries but the video after the break shows that it physically exists. This particular model of camera hasn’t been manufactured since 1984 so there’s little chance that the company’s bringing it back in a digital format. What we have here is a classic camera body with a modern point-and-shoot fit inside. This seems to be a PowerShot SD 870 IS and we’d guess the original lens has been replaced with a plate of glass so as not to affect the PowerShot’s focus, and the “AE-1 Program Digital” screen is probably just an image on the memory card.

We admire the clean mod work necessary to produce this hack.

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How-To: Expand Your Camera With CHDK

As anyone who has lusted over the technical specifications for Canon’s new Digital Rebel XSi knows, the capabilities of the average point and shoot camera are severely limited. Using the CHDK firmware hack, the features of Canon point and shoot cameras can be significantly expanded, allowing for ultra-high speed photography, very long exposures, time lapse photography, and RAW capture. This How-To provides a guide to our experiences using the CHDK firmware, and shows just how easy it is to get more out of a point and shoot than ever thought possible.

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