Left: A hand holding a silver Canon PowerShot A490 camera. Right: A cluster of pink hydrangea flowers surrounded by green leaves.

Photographer and artist Red transformed the 15-year-old Canon PowerShot A490 compact camera into an impressively capable camera. The camera, which launched in 2010 for just over $100, delivers surprisingly good image quality, at least after a bit of hacking.

Red shared his hacked camera on Reddit earlier this week, showcasing the camera’s impressive RAW image quality.

“I hacked an old Canon point and shoot from 2010 to shoot RAW and I’m blown away by the results,” Red wrote on Reddit.

A black Hyundai Veloster N with red accents is parked in an empty parking lot in front of a weathered wooden fence and a building with red and white siding.

The Canon PowerShot A490 has a small Type 1/2.3 CCD sensor paired with a built-in 37-122mm (equivalent) f/3-5.8 lens. The $100 compact camera lacks many features out of the box, including the ability to capture RAW photos — it only supports JPEG. At least before a bit of tinkering.

“I used CHDK, which stands for Canon Hack Development Kit,” Red tells PetaPixel over email. “CHDK is a firmware hack that enables more control of your camera including things like custom scripts and importantly the ability to shoot in RAW with cameras that never had the ability to out of the box.”

The photographer says there are “many ways” to get CHDK onto a compatible Canon PowerShot camera, but he opted to use a free tool called CHIMP.

A calm river with floating docks in the foreground, a bridge and industrial buildings in the background, and partly cloudy skies at sunset. Text reads "Unedited RAW" in the bottom left corner.

A tranquil riverside scene at sunset shows a bridge spanning the water, with colorful clouds in the sky and buildings along the shore. Floating docks and a walkway line the water. "After editing" text appears in the lower left corner.

“All you do is format your SD card of choice, take one picture with the camera you wanna hack and load it to that SD card and throw it in a reader connected to your PC and run CHIMP,” Red explains. “CHIMP will then use that picture to identify things like firmware version and camera model to automatically download the correct version of CHDK for your camera to the SD card! Then all you have to do is insert the card into the camera with the write protection lock set to ‘on,’ and boom! You now have a hacked camera!”

Red says he bought the camera just a few days before posting to Reddit and hacked it the very first night after purchasing it from the owner of the film lab he uses.

“Shout out to Todd of Main St Photo for the great deal,” Red adds.

“I had little experience with this camera and in fact it was my first compact ‘digi’ cam, but I did have extensive experience using a hacked bridge point-and-shoot camera called the Canon SX40 HS, and it was a similar process to hacking using CHDK,” Red explains.

“This camera far exceeded my expectations once I was able to shoot RAW, especially wildlife photos since the camera has a crazy amount of zoom!”

A person in an orange shirt fishes by the waterfront near a dock, with a large arched bridge in the background under a partly cloudy sky. The words "Unedited RAW" appear in the lower left corner.

A person in an orange shirt fishes by the water at sunset, near empty docks and a bridge under a partly cloudy sky. White text at the bottom left reads "After editing.

The A490 performs extensive in-camera processing on JPEGs, which can result in images with default settings having an overly digital appearance, especially in challenging or low-light situations.

However, the RAW files, which open easily in RAW photo editing software like Lightroom, require only a bit of denoising but otherwise offer an impressive amount of flexibility for such a compact camera. Red also notes that the photos need some lens corrections, which are otherwise baked into the JPEG images.

“The great thing about the RAW files is that they’re like a ‘digital’ negative, an unaltered pure representation of what the sensor sees, and that gives you the ability to tweak the results much farther than you would be able to with the already compressed and processed JPG,” Red says. “You’re able to get the absolute best the camera can give you.”

Large clusters of vibrant pink hydrangea flowers with green leaves, resting near a bed of small rocks. The words “Unedited RAW” are written in white text at the bottom left corner.

Bright pink hydrangea flowers surrounded by lush green leaves, with the words "After editing" in white text in the bottom left corner. The image appears vibrant and saturated.

While RAW files rarely look great right out of the camera, especially with something like the A490, Red says he loves the creative control and process of editing photos.

“It’s the process and journey to the end result that I love,” the photographer explains, which is a big part of why they also love analog photography.

“For me, there’s nothing like getting beautiful results out of hardware where the expectations are so low,” Red continues. “It reminds me of a quote I heard once, ‘the amazing thing about the dancing bear isn’t how well it dances, but that it dances at all.’ For me, the amazing thing about photography is getting something beautiful regardless of the limitations of the tools that you use, and I think that’s far more satisfying to get good pictures out of a bad camera than good pictures out of a great camera!”

Red admits he’s still new to photography, but he’s having a blast as he learns the ropes.

An old-fashioned streetlamp glows beside a leafy green bush with small white flowers, in front of a stone building with a stained glass window and a red door. A black iron fence runs along the foreground. Text reads "Unedited RAW.

A glowing street lamp illuminates green foliage and a brick wall near a window at dusk. Iron railings run along the foreground. The words "After editing" appear in white text at the bottom left.

“Photography in general is very new to me! I started around May of this year and just became hyper fixated and dove headfirst into the hobby,” Red explains. They have acquired a few instant cameras, including the Polaroid Go, Instax Mini Evo, and even a Polaroid SX-70, so far. Gear acquisition syndrome sets in fast.

These cameras got Red into watching instant photography channels like In An Instant and Just Another Chris, which fueled the passion even further.

“I fell in love with working around the limitations of instant film and working to get great shots. I started to fall in love with the process of photography itself,” says Red.

Photography arrived none too soon for Red.

“The beginning of this year was rough for me and mentally I feel very much like I was disassociating a lot. I’d get up, eat, go to work, go to bed, and repeat. Constantly going through the motions and not really being present mentally in the moment at all. Like, I was there but I wasn’t ‘there,’ so to speak, almost feeling like a machine doing the motions it was programmed for while I helplessly watched depression slowly take away my motivation to do anything else,” Red recalls.

“Getting into photography was huge for my overall mental health and wellbeing. It got me out of the house, it let me focus on the beauty of little things and capture the world and things I liked as I saw them and that let me slow down and generally feel more human in a way. I was no longer a robot just going through the motions, I now had something to do that I loved doing, and that definitely grounded me a lot more and let me focus on life and my surroundings.”

Photography is a fantastic opportunity for people to express themselves creatively and experience the world around them. With affordable point-and-shoot cameras and a bit of hacking, people can get into photography without breaking the bank, without sacrificing the image quality or creative possibilities that are often reserved for only high-end, expensive cameras. With some tinkering and patience, even entry-level point-and-shoot cameras can produce some impressive results.

Image credits: Red (@redscwerel)