can you help a fiend of mine to take the right decision please? - General Discussion and Assistance - CHDK Forum  

can you help a fiend of mine to take the right decision please?

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I have a friend who wish to start with photography. she have economic problems and she's budget is 80 euros.
previously I spoke to her about how important is to have a camera that shoot in RAW and can take photos in manual mode so she was excited to learn using lightroom and I could teach her or give her some tips to start.
the problem is that she is out of budget and I'm in pain because I wish to help her but I cant (I have also economic problems and I have not a work). I said to her wait the next month and try to add 50 euro to your budget. she says is hard.
so I started to take info, I have remembered about your firmware, I wish to ask you if there is a camera that we can buy for about 150 euro, to hack with the chdk firmware please. and if this could be the right solution for her. my fear is that it could be complicated to menage, she have not knowledge about those thinks.

thx for help

Re: can you help a fiend of mine to take the right decision please?
« Reply #1 on: 07 / May / 2015, 21:02:19 »
You can get many CHDK supported used cameras on eBay for 80 euros or less.   The list of supported cameras is here :  http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK on the right hand side half way down the web page.

Don't worry too much about the firmware version.  You will almost always get a supported version and if you don't, we can probably help you get a new port for a new firmware version.

However,   CHDK is a hack and while not hard to use,  it is also not really newbie friendly.  You have to read a lot of the documentation ( http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK_1.3.0_User_Manual ) to use it.  You will have to judge whether your fiend would find this manageable or not.


Ported :   A1200    SD940   G10    Powershot N    G16

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Offline reyalp

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Re: can you help a fiend of mine to take the right decision please?
« Reply #2 on: 07 / May / 2015, 21:47:22 »
I have a friend who wish to start with photography. she have economic problems and she's budget is 80 euros.
Some Canon refurbished cameras with manual controls have been selling for ~$50-$100 on the US canon site. If they do something similar for Europe, it might be a good option. The refurb SX160 I got was like new for ~$50.

The S series like the S90, S100 or S110 sometimes show up for ~$100, and have raw and manual controls without needing CHDK.
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previously I spoke to her about how important is to have a camera that shoot in RAW and can take photos in manual mode so she was excited to learn using lightroom and I could teach her or give her some tips to start.
FWIW, it can be quite difficult to get better results from CHDK raw than the canon jpeg. For a camera that has raw in the factory firmware, most raw processing programs will give you pretty good results with default settings. With CHDK, this is often not the case, the calibration in CHDK isn't very good, and the low end cameras lots of noise and of optical defects that you have to correct when you use raw.

For someone getting started on very low budget, it might be better to just focus on composition and exposure and not worry about raw.

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and if this could be the right solution for her. my fear is that it could be complicated to menage, she have not knowledge about those thinks.
CHDK can be quite technical and not very user friendly.
Don't forget what the H stands for.

 

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