EEVblog #625 - Retro Teardown: Sony's First Digital Camera

hi welcome to tear down Tuesday you know I love vintage stuff here on the eevblog so I got another vintage tear down bit of consumer history here this is Sony's first really usable consumer camera not quite actually the first one was the DSC f1 model back in 1996 but that didn't have any removable media in it this was Sony's first camera that actually have had removable media you could take it out with your images on it and stick it in your camera how novel and this is the MVC FD 7 there was also the FD 5 as well the only difference is this was the bigger model with the times 10 optical zoom lens on it Wow that was huge for the day and we're talking 17 years old here 1997 vintage and pretty groundbreaking product back then and what did you get for your money for your huge amount of money back then I think it was like fourteen hundred dollars or something like that or well over a thousand dollars I don't know what that is in today's money but it doesn't seem that long ago 17 years you got to remember the technology back then I mean look at this thing right I'll show you in comparison with a modern camera in a minute how big and chunky this thing truly is but what did you get is it you know 5 megapixels - one 1/2 No try it not 0.3 megapixel 640 by 480 and I believe it even had a and interpolated sensor in it so that it was the sensor was actually less than that so go figure but that's what you got back there but the most amazing thing about this is check it out watch this what did it store it on compact flash card hey that was designed in about 1994 so it could've but no you've got to remember back then there probably weren't any compact flash card readers for PCs so although the compact flash was around um you know hmm bit harder so what it use SD card no they didn't come around until like 2000 or so like that Sony memory stick nope that was a year later what did they store it on tada crikey look at that three and a half inch floppy but this was incredibly convenient back then because people were still using three and half inch floppies this was groundbreaking that you could just store your images on a three and a half inch floppy and whack em straight in your PC and use them you didn't have to hook up a cord have special software to transfer and all that sort of stuff just saved it as a JPEG on a floppy unbelievable now this was the first camera in Sony's mavica line and supposedly mavica stands for magnetic video camera and it makes sense it stored it on magnetic media the three and a half inch floppy and hence the FD in the title floppy disk and there was a later upgrade for this way you could actually get a plugin that allowed it to store it on to Sony memory stick at a later date but these were incredibly useful cameras where these were highly sought after where I worked and we had these for documenting all sorts of stuff that was groundbreaking to be able to take a photo snap and then instantly put it embed it into your Word document for product documentation stuff like that unbelievably convenient but geez what a relic the advance in consumer technology even in a couple of years from this I got my first digital camera in around about 2000 so I was only a couple of years after this and it was to me it was a kodak 2 megapixel one and only had a times 3 optical lens but you know it was ran on standard double-a batteries and saved to compact flash card and all that sort of stuff so really it was a modern camera I mean this thing it is still a modern camera but floppy disk Hey well you can still buy a USB floppy disk adapters can ya yeah I don't have one so I'm not able to test this doesn't even have a battery unfortunately now of course the main problem with using a floppy disk as the storage medium is that well if you remember back then these things took time to write to them there first of all they had to spin up the speed then the head had to physically move into position there and write the data and then spin it down and so this thing would take about six or seven seconds between shots he'd press the button and I don't know how fast the shutter was on this thing and how instantly it took it when you actually press the button but you'd have to wait at you know six or seven seconds or longer before he could take another shot because it didn't have any buffer memory in it before you could take the next shot to save it to floppy disk ah goodness but that was this was groundbreaking back in the day because the previous cameras there were previous digital cameras to this but they had internal memory not on removable card limited internal memory you might be able to store you know ten twenty thirty shots or something like that but this thing you could carry around as many three and a half inch floppies as you wanted and though I pretty cheap back then and you can store you know hundreds or thousands of images this thing has a stammerer of 500 shots so it claims or a two-and-a-half-hour no one-and-a-half hour battery life so that was pretty groundbreaking to store more photos and cheaper than a film camera at the time and that was what made digital cameras successful is that they were just more convenient and eventually became cheaper and easier than your traditional film cameras and all that happened in the span of just a couple of years really amazing before film cameras were except for you know really high resolution stuff which er it took a few more years after that for the digital cameras to really come into their own but the amazing thing about this is even though it was 640 by 480 VGA quality images right the image quality was actually really good because back then they weren't trying to meet these incredibly low price points for these are cameras that they are D these days and trying to design the lenses to meet these in a big high resolution sensors to match these sensors well this thing only had a 640 by 480 sensor you can easily put a top quality lens on this thing and this is what they did so they actually took really good photos it's just that the resolution was incredibly limited so you know we say only vblog don't turn it on take it apart just to give you a feel for how big this thing really is check out compared to oh well quite a few years old modern you know pocketable camera I mean just look at the thickness of that the height of that thing I mean it's just absolutely ridiculous look at that crazy and if you compare it to a modern a compact digital SLR this is a Sony next 5t camera I mean just look at that unbelievable and the performance difference is Wow so although it was a big chunky beast it actually feels like it's built fairly well fairly solid I mean like there's no real proper grip on the thing ergonomics yeah they've put them they've put the shutter button here but that's about as far and the zoom here that's about as convenient as it gets I mean they've got the auto manual focus on this side over here so I guess that's not too bad you can adjust the focus there but yeah ergonomics leaves a little bit to be desired and it ran on a 7.2 volt lithium ion battery back then unfortunately doesn't have one but we might be able to our power it up later if we can get in there and attach a power supply to the contacts yes there was a tripod mount on the thing and you know not a huge amount of manual control on it it wasn't for your profession it was basically it pretty much used it in auto mode you know most of the time yeah it did have a flash on the front but apparently that was pretty poor and well but did have a pretty good lens on at that times 10 optical lens so that was was pretty decent for the day and matched more than match the sensor which is the main things it actually got pretty decent shots out of it all right let's take this sucker apart not sure where to start but I'll just take off every screw possible and yet we expect virtually all surface mount technology in this thing there'll be more boards obeah there'll be a sensor board in there probably sensor directly mounted on a board after the lens it will have some sensor processing maybe there'll be another complete processor board in there I mean just look at the thickness of this thing sure the floppy drive you know takes up a fair good chunk of that but it's only sort of that section down in there so there's still all of this in there I mean those optics are going to be pretty deep and look how look how much the screen protrudes out the back like that so the screen driver probably has a tone board on it something like that yeah and load out some custom Sony chips as well there will be no surprises there I'm sure it to be interesting to see what sort of processor at years you know there was no like I didn't maybe they've got like an image up process and they might have had a JPEG processing chip to do that I'm not sure if they did that like a custom ASIC to do that like they do these days they have these imaging chips every manufacturer has their own flavor of an architecture of their imaging chips which does all the processing crunching obviously it didn't have to go very fast because most of the time was taken up by writing to the floppy disk so maybe one you know it starts spinning up the floppy disk at the same time it's actually processing and crunching the image and by the time it's finished processing and crunching that could take you know even if it took a second or two to process and crunch a you know a 640 by 480 vga image then you know really the floppy drive is up to speed and and it's ready to write so it wouldn't have to be quick so as an electronics designer for this thing you'd go are great it's storing a floppy woohoo I don't have to try and kill myself to design a thing to get it really a hello to get it right down hello hello it's starting to pop she's ready to pop oh yeah we've got some flat flex joining the boards yeah I can see a main processor board down in there well it's all a bit it's all a bit tricky ah let me try and prise it all open and it finally did just crack right open and swings out like that so we've got our there's all our flash circuitry on the back you can tell by the huge cap on there so that charges up for the flash probably a little bit of battery management down in there or battery protection but here's the main guts of it and the first thing you notice which is really interesting is that that sensor does not go down to the board down there as ie well just guess they didn't really put any thought into it but look they've got it mirrored right-angle here's the sensor board here's the sensor mounted on this right angle PCB here with the flat flex going down to the main processing board there and yeah so they're clearly getting a mirror in there and sending the image through there and it's reflecting down into the sensor down into the bottom there look at that that's how they can fit probably the full x 10 zoom in this thing in well this compact nature of the camera so you can see how the advancement in technology is really happened but back then they probably had to do it right angle like that to get that massive x 10 optical zoom in the thing Wow now I'm actually going to see if I can power this thing up with an external bench supply you can see thee there's two terminals down in there which are the tabs for the battery I mean I can't get wires down through there but I can easily access those and solder two wires on so just check which ones what because I don't know the polarity so let's try and find the ground and we can just do the exposure on the solder mask there no no nothing and try the other one hey hello yep there we go alright so that's our negative terminal that's our positive hook it up to the bench supply and see if it still works now I know that this thing uses an info lithium battery so it's one of those smart batteries with building electronics to measure basically do a Coulomb counting pretty much I believe so to tell you the exact capacity remaining in the battery and well it may not even pair up if it doesn't have that real battery I don't know the sony info lithium data stream or how to simulate or anything like that but hey so it's a bit of a long shot but I'm going to give it a crack so I've got it hooked up to my bench supply here are seven point two volts just one amp current limit I don't know how much up power it takes so let's turn it on and see what happens so let's go on well I drew some initial current there okay but it's drawing it's drawing 1 milliamp at the motor that's drawing a little you know a tiny little amount as you'd expect so let's see if we can power this thing on and yeah it tried to do something there yeah it tried to switch on hey there it is it's on it's on it works look look at that I got it no disk aha beauty can we take a photo let's whack the floppy disk in and Wow Wow I'm surprised I'm surprised is it going that way no I always put these bloody distant even though it's got a thing to tell you which way to put it in this is a brand new floppy I believe 3m floppy there we go it recognized the disk the disk is there let's see if we can take a photo let me put this thing back on and let's get something interesting in the shot there let's get our fluke multimeter got a bit of glare on that can't have that and let's see if we can take a photo of this thing Wow here we go I'm going to put it on order yet on auto so here we go recording wheel that is that recording the shot I don't think it does video clunk look it did it I think it took a photo can we play that back file access one of one yep ah this is terrific Wow there we go it works it's alive and curiously look it shows the battery half full there so I'm not sure how good that in fauxlivia's smart info lithium is because I got nothing looked up to that third terminal Wow in case you're wondering what sort of power it takes there there we go 2.5 watts just statically displaying the image and here we go I'll go back to camera mode and there we go we can see it there we go 3 odd what's there so there you go my 1 ampere current limit you know I thought I 7 watts would be you know plenty for it and sure enough there it is I'm moving the image around at the moment that's how much it takes now I'll shoot another photo take another shot so it's recording to the disk here we go there we go it's jumping up to 5 watts that's what it that's what happens when you record too floppy still riding still riding and it should drop back down yep there we go so that was a little bit of a shot in the dark but it worked and that this camera still works I mean look I can't even see any dead pixels on that display after about 17 years I'm not sure what the resolution of that is jeez what it be that you know 2fort it's not even 320 by 240 I don't think that resolution of that screen is pretty poor but jeez that that is great it still works my floppy disk still works my original 3m floppy disk is brand new straight out of the packet how do we char our we've got to go up there that's annoying I'm using the joystick thing file access yeah yeah it's pretty annoying to go between images let me tell you takes forever to file access to of two then we got it not exactly easy to replay your photos look at that but hey this enough for the day I'm telling you this thing was the Ducks guts and as for the zoom on this thing it actually it had variable speed so I can move pretty quick and if I can I can make it go like slow like that or if I really push it so I had velocity sensing on that little thumb switch there so that's great this this really worked a treat I'm telling you this was a pretty good gap up in the resolution and that just the general dick enos of using it it was actually quite it got the job done it was pretty reasonable and yes we have different picture effects here check this out for our state of the art dedicate a button for it at pastel negative completely that that's great that's great to be able to do that in camera sepia what's that black and white that's just yeah that's terrific so you might think the 640 by 480 resolution on this sensor here is just you know what use was it well it was perfectly fine for doing shots for your website for example well you know the web hadn't been around a very long back then and only been around five years or something like that so to be able to put photos on your website was absolutely phenomenal and of course someone like a reporter for example could be out taking a photo and hey they can even get a negative effect or something like that if they want to do and then they can rush the floppy back to HQ and then bang it he goes straight in that day's newspaper or that nightly news at night because 640 by 480 of course would be perfectly fine for standard definition television back in the day not a problem whatsoever so it would be great fair like in just in the feel reporting and stuff like that but yeah as I said the technology progressed pretty darn quick but hey you know if you've got a year's use out of this thing a year or two then I would have been fantastic there we go I was able to take the whole lens and sensor assembly out and you can see there is our mirror so that's how input so there's nothing behind there it's just a mirror and of course all of the zoom and optics is all happening inside that puppy and of course we got some flat flex there going over I mean flat flex has been used in cameras since geez the Polaroid ones back in the 70s I think the the actual Polaroid the instant ik the first Instamatic camera was I think one of the first consumer items they quote me but I think it was to use a flat flex technology for joining things together it looks like we got ourselves three motors in this sucker that one down in there I've got one tucked in here there they're all joined with that flat flex of course there it is and well there could be another something in there and so there could be four actually but that one's hidden away we can't see it and another one over here so we probably have a couple of motors for the zoom element so there'd be mold and probably multiple light elements in there for the times 10 zoom and focus and stuff like that so yeah it needs a few motors but that's a that's a nice little assembly but look at that I mean today's modern ones they go directly into the sensor chip straight behind here none of this mirror to get you times 10 zooms alright everyone's dying to see this staggeringly huge sensor I'm 640 by Fort way I had just popped off there there we go I I have read that it was actually it's not 640 by 480 it's actually at 640 by 240 so anyway I'll get this under the digital microscope I've got my new - Garneau microscope hooked up and we'll have a look at that puppy all right let's have a look at this under my - Garneau microscope I finally got this thing working I'm capturing it using my avermedia HDMI Pro a capture card and I can zoom right in well we know we're near it yet it's rather annoying having that does oom Tex come up on the display but here is the sensor and we'll be able to go pretty much right inside that sucker and there it is gets a little bit noisy as we go in but because the light is lower in there of course but there we go that is the that is the sensor so it does look like it's 640 by 480 so I read that it might have been a 640 by 240 and then up scaled up but suck so yeah sorry it's really quite hard to see through see through this really deep lens on the thing I don't want to take the lens off just to get in there and have a look at the sensor but that's the full zoom yeah it's full zoom on lighter Jarno microscope but there we go see the bond wires gold bond wise going over there it's a serial output CCD device of course and that is a thing of beauty look at that what a Bobby Dazzler state of the art for the day haha beautiful I love this microscope it really is quite nice it's I'm recording directly from the HDMI output using that HDMI capture Pro card and it's got h.264 Hardware compression built-in so I'm recording this on an old Core 2 Duo machine because all that processing is done on in the hardware basically and then it doesn't have to do much it's just recording to a regular old hard drive so this ancient machine is capturing Full HD from HDMI at 25 frames per second it's capable of 30 this this - Garneau microscope gives 60 frames per second output but the capture cards not that good it can only do 30 maximum but I've capturing this at 25 frames per second to match my regular video camera which is all at 25 so there you go neat little sensor alright let's take a look at the main board here and pretty much all of the electronics is on here except for the display controller I believe so let's have a look to give you a bit of orientation this was the power coming in up over here this is obviously going off to the display over here and then these were our CCD inputs down here that went off to our camera and the motor drive and stuff like that so let's start out by having a look at this beast here and this is a Hitachi now renesis of course I'm sh 703 for 32-bit micro 26 MIPS it's only got like 4k of memory built in it's working at 20 mega Hertz you can see the oscillator there and over in this corner here obviously the big inductors and caps here this is all part of our DC to DC converter and obviously this is our DC to DC controller here it's an MB three seven eight 5a it's a four channel controller we get our first look at a date code here there we go the 44th week 1997 and of course this is our power input here are coming from the battery compartment as we saw before so all that generates all our different rails required inside this thing now this part here I couldn't actually get any data on that I didn't spend too long but anyway that's working at 20 megahertz as well separate and it's got part of the real-time clock there as well going into that but that's obviously some sort of the display control axis right near the display connector here so that's got to have something to do with the display on this thing and then if we go over to this one around here Woo's microscope is fun this goes off to our floppy drive and sure enough this NEC part if you can look straight in there two seven seven two zero six nine yeah six nine g.f that one is our floppy drive controller so that's working at 16 megahertz and then of course offloads all of the work from the processor to drive the floppy drive and we've got some memory associated with that with these device around here as well now this part in here what you are at first glance you might think it's a memory like these parts here these are 512 K D Rams therefore the main processor but look this is an MB 989 and what this sucker is is it's an on-screen character generator so as you saw previously in the video how all that text was being displayed on the screen what's been displayed by the processor well the processor was spending sending the ASCII characters and the positional data but this chip is actually an onscreen video display controller with either an RGB or a our power NTSC why see video output so it's actually outputting a video signal which then must go to the screen so the screen is actually a composite video or RGB video screen so to speak so it's a character generator got a building character generator ROM it can generate 24 columns by 12 rows not huge in each character can be 12 by 18 dots so there you go that's rather that's rather an interesting way to do it but we actually we saw that in one of the cheap camera tear downs I think one of the more recent ones so yeah that's how they did it back then they converted it in the video even though this camera doesn't have a an external video output that can go off to a camera like your modern ones then they can go off to a monitor like it or a TV like your modern cameras do and given that we have a CCD sensor input here what's this analog devices part the 80 9800 J well of course it's a CCD signal processor and it's coupled into this part like another Hitachi part I couldn't get any info on that so I probably need to look harder but that could be doing J JPEG gut compression for example or something like that it's a pretty big beast so whether or not the JPEG compression is done in the main 32 bit processor Hitachi processor we saw before or in here I mean this is a big bit of silicon I suspect so yeah I think there could be some beefy signal the image processing type stuff going on in there curiously there is a an unpopulated connector there which we can zoom in on we will zoom in on just because we can are this folk camera can't focus all the way in at the moment by the way because this thing is too high this camera is too thick and too high off the bench that doesn't allow us to do full zoom on that and this puppy down in here the 88 one four six I believe that's a Fujitsu 12 channel 8-bit DAC so they're obviously using that Ferb output in some sort of you know bias levels or something to that effect I don't know precisely now I was getting a bit concerned about the lack of custom Sony parts on here so I took the screws out and let's flip it over and tada here we go now we're talking this is what we expect to see in a Sony product custom Sony parts now I've had to look for these numbers and I can't find them anywhere so yeah I mean CSD 3125 i you can find lots of brokers that may or may not have stock of this sort of stuff and of course we need something for our motor drive so here's like it did give away all these big beefy tracks on here for the motor drive this is this connector is our CCD data coming out into our CCD image processor here at but this connector obviously used to drive all of our motors zoom and focus and all that jazz and it must be that puppy there that NEC controller there must be a motor drive controller but what these parts are doing around here I've got no idea hmm now what is that and why is that mounted on an angle it's the only part on the board that's mounted on an angle interesting I've got no first guess on that one and it looks like we've got ourselves a Mitsumi floppy drive here I've got some test connectors test pads going on down in there so there we go that's for making the floppy drive alignment or something who knows I don't know would have come aligned surely but they've gone to the effort to cut out the plastic in there so I'm probably not going to take the rest of it apart because the only thing we've got on the backside is just the display and the buttons and well I'm not you know that that doesn't really gain as much info man we've already seen that the motor controller is on here so really you know yeah so I'm pretty done happy with this - Garneau microscope actually it's you know it works really well I've got my tilt swivel monitor up here and I can direct our view out of the microscope as well as captured I've just got my capture button here I just hit that and I've got my Samson go mic hooked up on top of here and it all just records and fantastic we're not few more little touches I need a DVI or HDMI a switch box so I can switch between the monitor and the PC and stuff like that but yeah this is going to work really well for tear downs and the quality fantastic so there you go I hope you enjoyed that retro teardown the sony mavica MVC FD 7 one of the sony's first practical digital cameras and saved to floppy drive that's fantastic back in its day I loved it and well that's what's inside at the march of technology is just unbelievable that's 17 years ago that's 1997 really and digital cameras proper didn't take off until you know 2000 like the early 2000s really before they started getting quite decent to replace your film camera with so there you go hope you enjoyed it as always there will be our high res teardown photos at eevblog comm that will be linked in down below and also if you want to discuss it the best place to do it is the eevblog forum and links down below for that as well as always and if you liked the video please give it a big thumbs up catch you next time you you you

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 94,060

Rating: 4.9065504 out of 5

Keywords: Sony, Sony (Business Operation), Digital Camera (Invention), Camera (Invention), First, digital camera, sony mavica, teardown, mvc-fd5, mvc-fd7, zoom lens, technology, ccd, ccd image sensor, microscope

Id: 1jPcYCcaHv0

Length: 33min 28sec (2008 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 04 2014