I'm trying to shoot in the dark, but I don't want to use a flash or longer exposure time to simply simulate as much as possible the daytime. Is there any way to convert my Canon XSi to either detect infrared light, or run through some sort of nightvision system? Is there a way to do this on a regular point-and-shoot camera?

Thank you for your time.

Have not hear or read anywhere about something like that,it is only the high ISO ,up to 12000,in fact it is called extended iso ,that can let you do some shooting at night with your conditions,at the expense of quality.

There is no infrared light at night. Infrared is a spectrum of daylight that is invisible to us. What you mean is a heat detector, used to detect the heat emitted by warmblooded animals and humans, but I doubt it would be suitable for using on a photo camera. Same applies for a nightvision: you'd have a greenish-noisy image as result. If you're keen on trying, maybe you should look in hunting equipment shops but any decent system should be quite expensive.

You can take the IR filter of your canon out, and use IR iluminators at night. There are special IR iluminators in special shops, like surveilance ans "spy" shops or hunting shops, as refered by Balazs.

I don't know of any way of converting your camera and I think the only practical way is for very high ISOs such as the D3s, I've seen pictures from a D3s in complete dark and they are certainly reasonable but display a lot of noise.

I guess you could try taking pictures through a night vision device but your results would be green. They are representing light magnified 25,000 times but they use the green wavelength as this is the colour that our eyes are most sensitive to.

Hi Paul,

Could you elaborate a little more on what you want to achieve exactly ? and why flash / long exposure are not relevant for that ?
I'm curious...

What about this one http://www.ownthenight.com/catalog/i72.html ...?

A bit expensive :-)

/Wulff

can i buy it?