I just looked on the Hawaii Department of Health website. The only type of birth record that one can request from them is a "certified copy" of a birth certificate, which I think is the type of document that Obama has previously displayed. (Personally I believe that this is a real document.) That was a Certification of Live Birth, and it's not a copy of anything, it's a data dump of information retrieved from the DoH database.
But I think it is possible to get a certified copy of the original Birth Certificate, which would look like this, pretty much any way, this one is from 1963, and the copy was made in 1968, while Obama's presumably is from 1961.
rather than like this Certification of Live Birth:
The above is likely a manipulated image, one with the data taken off electronically, rather than an image of a blank form.
After reading the court filing discussed in
this thread, I think I understand the situation better.
Between 1959 and 1972 there were two types of Hawaiian birth certificates.
The usual type contained the name of the hospital where the birth occurred and was signed by the doctor assisting with the delivery. But because many Hawaiians before statehood had not even had birth certificates, the state allowed a different type of certificate to be created on the testimony of one person.
The "certified copy" of birth certificate presented by Obama so far (and which is apparently the only type of copy that is normally issued now) does not show which of these two types of original birth certificates is in the Hawaiian archives.
If Obama did in fact have one of the types of original birth certificates that did not record a hospital birth, that would raise a lot of questions.
However, I do not believe that the modern certificate presented by the Obama campaign is a "manipulated image", other than the blacking out of the serial number and the fact that it was run through a scanner.