Over the last week or so I have been experimenting with Time-lapse. The plan was to use my dSLR till I worked out that I could kill the mechanism with thousands and thousands of shutter releases.
So I moved on to my phone/tablet in the hope of a compromise. It worked but I was undecided about the image quality
I had thought of using my Canon compact but it did not have any Time lapse features. However a bit of googling later I discovered the world of a Canon Hack Development Kit.
Basically, if your camera is on their list then you can open it up to a world of new features and for me this included Time Lapse.
After an hour or so reading I had a go. For my camera all I had to do was check out its firmware and download the correct zip-file. The zip file was then unzipped onto a SD Card and inserted into my camera. A few button presses later I was up and running.
In total I had a new camera in under five minutes flat. And if I wanted to revert back to the stock camera, I simply replaced the SD card.
Its bewildering all the new features that have been opened up to me for five minutes of physical effort.
If you are feeling brave give it a try. My camera is still alive.
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK