In certain corners of the geek world, people buy products not necessarily because of what they can do out of the box, but because of what they could potentially do down the road. And no, I’m not talking about the Playstation 3. (zing) Firmware hackers, kernel developers, reverse-engineerers and general-purpose tinkerers alike have all broken into (or just plain broken) tons of your favourite portable electronic devices in an attempt to make them do things their manufacturers never imagined or intended. From routers that run Linux-based firmware to iPods that play Doom, people have always gotten a perverse pleasure out of making devices dance to a new tune.

But the holy grail has always been that neat little hack (or collection of hacks) that suddenly unlocks a wealth of functionality previously tucked away in the depths of a high-powered processor punching well above its weight. It’s the digital equivalent of flipping a switch to turn your Toyota Corolla into a Lexus sports sedan. Such hacks are possible because oftentimes electronics manufacturers find it cheaper to produce one microprocessor for a host of different devices (at different price points) rather than developing a new processor for each device separately. To continue the car analogy, it’s like using the same engine for the $10,000 subcompact and the $80,000 luxo-sedan, and then artificially limiting the engines going into the $10,000 cars so they only produce a quarter of the horsepower. Remove the artificial limiter, and suddenly you’ve got a 400hp subcompact car.

So you can imagine the excitement certain amateur photographers must be feeling about this custom firmware for DIGIC II-based Canon cameras. Among other things, it theoretically turns any DIGIC II camera into one that can produce RAW files—even the relatively cheap Powershot A630. There’s also a histogram and zebra display, which are probably more useful on a day-to-day basis than RAW (which may or may not be a bit slow to write on consumer-level cameras). Theoretically a wide range of cameras support the hack, but at present only a subset of A-series cameras and the S2/S3 have firmwares you can dump on an SD card and go. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if greater publicity of the custom firmware brought new firmware files for Powershot SD cameras as well.