I’ve spent a day trying to get to the bottom of some strangeness in using ISO bracketing in continuous mode, on various cams.
Which cameras do you see this on?
What I see and I don’t understand is that if I set up the custom timer for two images and set bracketing in con mode in CHDK to, say, 1600, the cam takes the two brackets, ie at base ISO and the 1600, the reported canon exposure reports the base cam values, ie the 125 and not the 1600, but the image on the screen is clearly th3 1600 one, ie bright.
By "reported canon exposure" do you mean the exif, the on screen display, or something else?
In general, it's not unusual for the exif or Canon UI to not accurately reflect override values, but we do try to fix the exif when possible.
Note that the bracketing value is how much to bracket by, so 1600 would actually try to 1725 It really should have an option to specify this as EV steps, but it doesn't. Patches welcome.
ISO settings between available UI values generally work (you can set ISO 234 and it's the expected amount brighter than 200), but the Canon UI will not display them accurately. ISO overrides generally do not work beyond the range available in the Canon UI, but (if it doesn't crash) normally use the closest available value, so setting 1725 on a camera that only goes to 1600 should have the same exposure as setting 1600. On some cameras, ISO settings at the high end of the range also do not (e.g. 1600 on a camera that only goes to 1600) are implemented differently from the normal range and aren't available from CHDK overrides.
f I then review the images via PLAY the images look good, and when I go back to the live view the image returns to the base image.
I'm not sure what you mean here. The bracketing setting shouldn't affect the live view image.
Can someone throw some education my way, as its driving me insane and I wish to use bracketing in con mode in a new script I’m writing.
In general, if you are doing this in a script, I'd suggest using the script to control the ISO value.