The camera handling for my last post reminded me to check to see if progress had been made on the CHDK port to for the Canon SD770 (the little point-and-shoot I have). There was a promising effort about a year ago, but the developer disappeared without releasing the partly functioning code, and it was quickly abandoned. Apparently someone else stepped up in November; there is now a (roughly) fully functional boot image available for the SD770.
CHDK features provide at least partial fixes for all my major complaints about the 770; the exposure override settings allow the flash to be kept under manual control through power cycles, even when the other features are on automatic, the exposure behavior can be more precisely controlled to hide noise issues in low light, and all the CHDK toys are now on hand, so I’m not missing any expected features.
Right now I just have a spare small card set up, but the process is non-destructive and simple, especially on cards <4Gb, so I’ll probably set up the pair of 1GB cards I usually use with it shortly. Anyone with a Canon camera should go set up a card with the appropriate CHDK image, it really does improve the camera.
EDIT: There are a couple bugs, the only serious one being that the camera crashes when using auto white balance with the version of CHDK in the linked thread loaded. I don’t have time to get into another environment to fix it.