How can I damage my digital camera on purpose?

That’s already been done though, the topic i’m covering in art is media and my teacher has already seen some of the stuff that glitching has to offer. Its got potential apparently :L

That will be too tricky as you could end up rending the camera useless if you try to alter some of the internal components.

Are you not allowed to alter it with Photo editing software?

I certainly admire your interest but the problem with things digital is they tend to be binary; they either work or they don’t. It is rare that damage that alters the performance of your camera won’t also kill it. Back in film days experimenting was much easier. As a lad I discovered that a 35mm film box with the flaps folded in fit perfectly onto recesses of a 126 Instamatic film cartridge. This became the basis of many cameras I made. I made pinhole cameras and cameras that used cheap uncorrected magnifiers as lenses to get dreamy old fashion B&W images. Then I discovered making box cameras with 4”x5” sheet film and even a panorama pinhole camera from an oatmeal container. Digital cameras and CCD sensors are not nearly as flexible as photographic film. The approach I’d take would be to remove the lens and use something else. I don’t know the size of the sensor on this camera but I’ll bet it is tiny. According to published specs it has a 9.3mm/2.8 lens so to be a “normal” lens the sensor would be about 8x10mm which is pretty small. Using the dimestore magnifiers I experimented with woudln’t be good because their focal length would be too long for a small sensor. The only cheap source for short focal length lenses I can think of is on kid’s microscopes. I wonder what the focal length of the lenses in CD and DVD players are. If you could separate one of these from a broken drive that is something you could experiment with but they might have too short a focal length.

Noticed a mistake in my calculation. A “normal” lens has a focal length about that of the frame’s diagonal measure. In a 24mm x 36mm 35mm film frame a normal lens would be 43.5mm but since SLR cameras need room for the mirror in the light box lenses shorter than 50mm need to be projection lenses which is why the standard 35mm film lens ended up being the slightly too long 50mm instead of 43.5mm. Since 35mm film is often cropped to print 4x5” or 8x10” the maximum useable area on the 35mm frame would be 30mm x 24mm in which case a normal lens would have a focal length of an even shorter 38mm which is why many 35mm photographers consider the 35mm focal length “wide-angle” lens to be the more appropriate normal lens. With a resolution of 2304x1728 the camera has an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 or 4:3 so with a focal length of 9.3mm lens so the sensor is probably closer to 5.25mm x 7mm than to 8mm x 10mm I previously calculated. 9.3mm 9.3mm =86.4mm^2 5.25mm5.25mm + 7mm*7mm = 86.56mm^2

I’m allowed to use photo editing software, but I would get a higher grade if I did the glitching and then recorded the outcome :)

what if i tried increasing the voltage?? would that do anything to the camera?? there are videos on youtube of people glitching low voltage items, such a digital cameras, to produce wierd pictures :)

There are sensitive components in a digital camera that may be fried by high voltages. As far as low voltages go every digital camera I owned shuts down then the batteries get low rather than malfunction. I really don’t think there is much you can do with the electronics without going into serious electronic work. Some cameras can run non-standard firmware but I don’t think its possible for this cheap a camera. I would remove the lens and treat the camera like a camera body and try different lenses. Many cheap lenses will distort, vignette and fringe. You are limited by the small sensor size though.