Exciting things happening in CHDK

As readers of my blog will know, I use Canon cameras because of their access to Magic Lantern and CHDK, especially Lua scripting.

Over the last month, the CHDK gurus (especially Philmoz) have made significant developments in CHDK, such that the CHDK display/drawing is now rock solid and has no conflict with the Canon 'drawing', ie no repetitive flickering.

Although the latest mods have yet to make their way into the CHDK trunks, I've been experimenting with a test version of the latest developments and have made a short video to show what things now look like.

I took the video on my M3. The set up looked like this:

My M3 Bracketing script places an info bar at the top of the camera's LCD/EVF screen, giving the user real time focus and exposure feedback, in three groups:

• The left hand group gives feedback on focus position, ie relative to the hyperfocal, and the actual focus, relative to the sensor's plane. The script uses a thick lens model to estimate the front principal, and provides the user the ability to estimate the entrance pupil position, by inputting the estimated pupil magnification, 1 for a telephoto lens and greater than unity for a retrofocus one;
• The centre group has three modes. The default mode is when the camera is in ALT mode, when it shows the focal length and the number of focus brackets required to reach the hyperfocal distance. The second mode is when the camera is in the non-ALT mode, when the display switches to show the relative exposure eV, rather than the focal length. Finally, the display will switch again if traffic light mode has been selected and an image has been taken. In this mode the left and right traffic lights tell you whether you have a negative of positive focus over lap, shown in microns, relative the last image taken;
• The right hand group has two formats, according to the menu settings. One shows the near and far DoFs, relative to the sensor. The other shows the near DoF and the infinity blur in microns.

As this post is just to show the progress that the CHDK gurus have made, I won't be going into details on using the script.

Here is the test video, showing the script's functionality and CHDK's new display stability. Note the left shift of the top bar is a feature of the HDMI capture. In the camera the bar is centred:

As usual I welcome any comments on this post or any of my posts.