For a long time I collected Motorola radios. I soon realized a “trick” — a lot of them had the same ‘guts’ and just had different software controlling them. If you cut the little “stopper” off of the channel knob on the channel knob and changed 2 bytes in the firmware, you had a 16-channel radio.

The higher-end radios were even more seriously software-dependent. The price of a radio could go up hundreds of dollars (thousands when new) depending on the features it has. But it turns out that the whole series had the same hardware, and various features were loaded via software. (This was actually publicly-known.) Soon, people realized how to suck the software out of one radio and drop it into another radio, and suddenly most hobbyist-owned radios had just about every feature possible.

I’m getting out of the radio trade, though. I began by getting a lot of two Canon digital SLRs off of eBay. The two cameras were very similar: both, in fact, had the same sensor. I kept the 10D, which was bigger and had a solid-metal casing, and sold the 300D, which was smaller and had a silly silver plastic case. Mine has a bunch of features that the 300D didn’t: ISO3200, the ability to control flash brightness, and a whole mess of “Custom Functions” that let you fine-tune things, to name a few.

It turns out that I was more right than I realized about them being closely related, though. There’s a firmware hack that brings a lot of the 10D functionality to the 300D. (All the ones I mentioned and then some!) Of course some features are missing: you can’t select autofocus points, for example.

But it’s interesting to learn that model differentiation via ‘crippling’ features in software is more prevalent than I’d once believed.