Hi welcome to Tear Down! Tuesday you know I love vintage stuff here on the evev blog. So I got another vintage tear down bit of consumer history here. This is Sony's first uh, really usable consumer camera. not quite actually.

The first one was the uh 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 Fd7.

There was also the Fd5 as well. The only difference is this was the bigger model with the times 10 optical zoom lens on it wo 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 was like $1,400 or something like that or well over $11,000 I don't know what that is in today's money, but it doesn't seem that long ago 17 years. but 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, 2, 1 a half? No. try it. 0.3 megapixel 640x480 and I believe it even had a and uh, 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 have.

but no, you got to remember back then, they probably weren't any compact flash card readers for PCs. So although the compact flash was around, um, you know, bit harder. So what it use SD card? No, they didn't come around until like 2000 or something like that. Sony memory stick? Nope, that was a year later.

What did they store it on? Tada Cy Look at that, 3 and A2 in floppy. But this was incredibly convenient back then cuz people were still using 3 and 1/2 floppies. This was groundbreaking that you could just store your images on a 3 and 1/2 in floppy and whack them straight in your PC and use them. You didn't have to hook up a cord, have special software to transfer it, 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 Mika line and supposedly Mava stands for magnetic Video camera and it makes sense. It sted on magnetic media, the 3 and 1/2 in floppy and hence the FD in the title sloppy Disc.

and uh, there was a later upgrade for this where 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. These were highly sought after where I worked and we uh, had these for documenting uh, 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 and stuff like that. Unbelievably convenient, but jeez, what a relic.

The advance in consumer technology even in a couple of years from this I Got my first Uh digital camera in around about 2000, so it was only a couple of years after this and it was too many. It was a Kodak 2 megapixel 1 and only had a Time stre Optical uh lens but you know it was uh, ran on standard ablea batteries and save 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 disc? Hey, well, you can still buy USB floppy disc adapters, can't you? 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 disc as a storage medium is that well, if you remember back then, these things took time to write to them. First of all, they had to spin up to speed.

Then the head had to physically move into position there and write the data and then spin it down. And so this thing, uh, would take about 6 or 7 Seconds between shots so you'd press the button and I don't know how fast the uh shutter was on this thing and how instantly it took it when you actually press the button, but you'd have to wait that you know 6 or 7 seconds or longer before you 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 your floppy disc. Oh goodness, but that was. This was groundbreaking back in the day cuz the uh, 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, 10, 20, 30 shots or something like that. but this thing, uh, you could carry around as many 3 and 1/2 in floppies as you wanted and they were pretty cheap back then and you could store you know, hundreds or thousands of images. This thing has a stammerer of 500 shots so it claims or a 2 and 1/2 hour H No 1 and 1/2 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 uh, your traditional film cameras. And all that happened in the span of just a couple of years. Really amazing before uh, film cameras were except for, you know, really high resolution stuff.

which, uh, 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 640x 480 VGA quality images, right? the image quality was actually really good. Cuz back then, they weren't trying to meet these incredibly low price points for these uh cameras that they are these days and trying to design the lenses to meet these. you know, big high resolution sensors to match these sensors.

Well, this thing only had a 640x 480 sensor. You could 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 what we say in the EV blog. don't turn it on, take it apart, and just to give you a feel for how big this thing really is. check out compared to a well, quite a few years old Modern? uh, 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, uh, compact digital SLR this is a Sony uh, NEX 5T camera. I mean just look at that. Unbelievable.

And the performance differen is Wow. So although was a big chunky Beast it actually feels like it's built fairly well. Fairly solid. Um I mean like there's no real proper grip on the thing.

Ergonomics: Yeah, they've put the they've put the shutter button here, but that's about as far. and the uh Zoom here, that's about as convenient uh as it gets. I mean they 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 ah yeah, Ergonomics leaves a little bit to be desired and it ran on a 7.2 Vol lithium ion battery back then. unfortunately doesn't have one, but we might be able to power it up later if we can get in there and uh, attach a power supply to the contacts. Yes, there was a tripod mount on the thing and uh, you know, not a huge amount of manual uh control on it. It wasn't for your professional, it was basically you pretty much used it in auto mode.

uh, you know, most of the time. Yeah, it did have a flash on the front, but uh yeah. Apparently that was pretty poor and well but did have a pretty good lens on it that X 10 optical lens so that was that was pretty decent for the day and matched more than matched the sensor which is the main thing. So 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, uh, take off every screw possible. and uh yeah, we expect, uh, virtually all surface mount technology in this thing. There'll be multiple boards.

there'll be a there'll be a sensor board in there, probably sensor directly uh mounted on a board. After the lens, it'll have some sens of 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, uh, 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, but look how, look how much the screen protrudes out the back like that. So the screen driver probably has its own board on it. Something like that.

Yeah, no out some custom Sony chips as well. There'll be no surprises there. I'm sure it uh, be interesting to see what sort of processor it used. you know there was no like I Maybe they've got like an image Art processor.

They might have had a JPEG uh processing chip to uh, do that I'm not sure if they did that like a custom Asic to do that. uh like they do these days. they have these Imaging chips. Every manufacturer has their own uh flavor of and architecture of their Imaging chips which does all the processing crunching.

Obviously it didn't have to go very fast cuz most of the time was taken up by right to the floppy disc so maybe one you know it starts spinning up the floppy disc 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 uh crunch a you know a 640 by uh 480 VGA image then and uh you know really the floppy driver is up to speed and uh and it's ready to ride so it it wouldn't have to be quick. So as an Electronics designer for this thing you'd go oh great it's storing to Floppy Woohoo! I don't have to try and uh uh kill myself to design a a thing to get it. Really? hey hello to get it right down. hello hello it's starting to pop.

She's ready to pop. Oh yeah, we got some flat Flex joining the boards. Yeah I can see a main process of board down in there. Well it's all a bit.

it's all a bit tricky. H Let me try and prize it all open and it finally did just crack right open and swings out like that. So we've got our uh, 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 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 I Uh, well just guessed I 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 uh, 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 the 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 I'll just check which one's what cuz I don't know the polarity. So let's try and find the ground and we can just do the uh exposure on the solder master there.

No, no, nothing and let's try the other one. Hey hello, Yep, there we go. All right. 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 uh to measure basically to do uh, coolm counting pretty much I I believe. So to tell you the exact capacity remaining in the battery and well, it may not even power 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 got it hooked up to my bench Supply here. uh 7.2 volts. uh just 1 amp current limit I don't know how much power it takes so let's turn it on and uh, see what happens. So let's go on.

Oh, it drew some initial current there. Okay, but it's drawing drawing. It's drawing 1 milliamp at the it'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 Disc Beauty can we take a photo? Let's whack the uh floppy disc in and wow. wow I'm surprised I'm surp does it go in that way? no I Always put these bloody discs in 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 disc.

The disc 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 auto. Yeah it's on auto.

So here we go. recording look at 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. oh 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 info lith. Smart info Lithium is cuz I got nothing hooked up to that third terminal and in case you're wondering what sort of power it takes there, There we go. go.

2.5 wats 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.

Three odd Watts there. So there you go. my 1 amp current limit. you know I thought 7 watts would be.

you know? uh, plenty for it. And sure enough, there it is. I'm moving the image around at the moment, but that's how much it takes now. I'll shoot another photo, take another shot.

so it's recording to the disc. Here we go. there, we go. It's jumping up to 5 Watts that's what that's what happens when you record to Floppy still ring, still ring 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 uh, this camera still works I mean look I can't even see any dead pixels on that display after 17 years. I'm not sure what the resolution of that is. Jeez what it be that you know 240.

it's not even 320 by 240. I Don't think the resolution of that screen is pretty poor, but jeez that that is great. It still works. My floppy disc still works.

my original 3M floppy disc. it's brand new. Straight Out of the packet. how do we jump? Oh, we got to go up there.

That's annoying. I'm using the uh joystick thing. File access: Yeah, yeah, it's pretty annoying to go between images. Let me tell you, it takes forever to uh file access two of two.

There we go. Not exactly easy to replay your photos look at that. but hey, this for the day. I'm telling you this thing was the duck's guts.

and as for the zoom on this thing, it actually it. It had variable speed. so I can move pretty quick and if I I can make it go like slow like that. or if I really push it.

so it had velocity sensing on that uh little uh thumb switch there so that's great. This this really worked. a treat. I'm telling you, this was a pretty good.

apart from the resolution and the just the general dickness of uh, using it 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. Oh, state-ofthe-art dedicate a button for it.

pastel, Negative. Look. look at that. That's great.

That's great to be able to do that in camera. Uh, Cpia, What's that Black and white? That's just yeah. That's terrific. So you might think the 640x480 resolution on this uh sensor here is just.

you know what use was it? Well, it was perfectly fine for doing shots for your website. uh, for example. Well, uh, you know, the web hadn't been around very long back then. Um, only been around 5 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 could even get a negative effect or something like that if they wanted to. And then they could Rush the floppy back to uh HQ and then bang. It'll go straight in that day's uh, newspaper or that uh 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 for like in just in the field reporting and stuff like that. But yeah, as I said, the technology progressed pretty darn quick. But hey, you know if you got a Year's use out of this thing a year or two, uh then hey, it would have been fantastic. Here we go: I Was able to take the whole lens and uh, sensor assembly out and you can see there is our mirror so there's our input so there's nothing behind there, it's just a mirror.

and of course all of the uh, zoom and Optics is all happening inside that puppy. And of course we got some uh flat Flex there going over I mean flat Flex has been used in cameras since gez the Polaroid ones back in the Uh 7s. I think the Uh the actual Polaroid the instatic. The first instatic camera was I think one of the first consumer items don't quote me but I think it was to use uh flat Flex technology for joining things together.

Looks like we got ourselves three motors in this sucker, that one down in there. we got one tucked in here. they're all joined with flat Flex Of course there it is. and well, there could be another something in there and so there could be four actually.

uh, 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 Uh Zoom elements. They'd be mold proba probably multiple elements in there for the times. 10 zoom and focus and stuff like that.

So yeah, needs a few MERS 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 your uh times 10 zooms. All right, everyone's dying to see this staggeringly huge sensor. um 640 By4 wa head just popped off. there.

There we go. I I Have read that it uh, was. actually it's not 640 by 480, it's actually 640x 240. So anyway, I'll get this under the Uh digital microscope.

I've got my new Tano microscope hooked up and we'll have a look at that puppy. All right, let's have a look at this under my Tano microscope. I've finally got this thing working I'm capturing it using my Uh AA media HDMI Pro capture card and I can zoom right in. Well, we're no, we're near it yet.

It's rather annoying having that Zoom text 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 cuz the light is lower in there of course. but uh, 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 Uh 240 and then uh, upscaled up. but uh so yeah.

sorry. it's really quite hard to see through. uh, see through this really deep lens on the thing and 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, that's full zoom on my Tano microscope. but there we go.

You see the Bond wise Gold Bond wies 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 Desler state-ofthe-art for the day. Beautiful! I Love this microscope.

It really is quite nice. It's uh I'm recording directly from the HDMI output using that HDMI capture uh Pro and it's got um h264 Hardware compression built in. so I'm recording this on an old Core 2 Duo machine cuz all that processing is done on in the hardware basically and then it doesn't have to uh do much. it's just recording to a regular old hard drive.

So this ancient machine is capturing full HD from HDMI at uh 25 frames per second, it's capable of 30 this. this Tano microscope gives UH 60 frames per second output. but uh, the capture card's 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. all right.

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 um to give you a bit of orientation. this was the power coming in up over here. this is OB ly going off to the Uh display over here and then these were our CCD um 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 Hatachi now Renaissance of course. um Sh 7034 32bit micro 26 mips uh it's only got like 4K of memory buil in it's working at 20 MHz You can, uh, see the oscillator there and over in this corner here. Obviously the big inductors and caps here. this is all part of our DC Todc converter and obviously this is our DC Todc controller here.

it's an MB 3785 A. It's a 4channel 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.

uh, 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 Uh data on that I uh, didn't spend too long, but anyway, that's working at 20 MHz as well. separate and it's got uh, part of the real time uh clock there as well going into that. but that's obviously some sort of the Uh display controller CU It's right near the display connector here, so that's got to have something to do with uh, the display on this thing.

And then if we go over to this one around here. Woohoo! This microscope is fun. Um, this goes off off to our Uh floppy Drive And sure enough, this NEC part if you can look straight in there the 7 7269 um, yeah, 69 GF that one is our floppy Drive controller so that's working at 16 MHz and that of course offloads all of the work from the processor to drive the Uh floppy drive And we've got some memory associated with that Uh with these devices around here as well. Now this part in here.

What You At first glance you might think it's a Memory Like these parts here, these are 512k uh dams there for the main processor. But look, this is an MB uh 989 and what this sucker is is it's an onscreen character generator. So as you saw previously in the video how all that text was being displayed on the screen wasn't being displayed by the processor. Well, the processor was spending send in the Asy characters and the positional data.

But this chip is actually an onscreen video display controller with either an RGB or a power Ntsc uh YC 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 uh video screen so to speak. So it's a character generator.

It's Bu got a building character generator ROM It can generate uh 24 columns by 12 rows not huge in each character. can be uh 12 by 18 dots. So there you go. That's rather.

um, it'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 uh, more recent ones. So yeah, that's how they did it back then they converted it into video. Even Though this camera doesn't have a an external uh video output that can go off to a camera like your modern ones, they can go after to a monitor like 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 Ad 9800 J Well, of course it's a CCD uh signal processor and it's coupled into this part. I another Hatachi part I couldn't uh, get any info on that? so I probably need to look harder, but that could be doing uh J Jpeg compression for example or something like that. It's a pretty big beast. So whether or not the jpeg compressions 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 uh, beefy signal, um, image processing type stuff going on in there. Curiously, there is a uh, unpopulated connector there which we can zoom in on. We will zoom in on just because we can. uh, this F camera can't focus all the way in at the moment.

by the way, cuz this thing is too high. This camera is too thick and too high off the bench that it doesn't allow us to do full zoom on that and this puppy down in here. the 8846a I believe that's a uh Fujitsu 12 channel 8bit uh Dack So they're obviously uh using that for outputting some sort of uh 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 Cxd 3125r.

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 in dead Giveaway 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. But uh, this connector obviously used to drive all of our Motors zoom and focus and all that jazz and uh, must be that puppy there that NEC uh controller there. it must be a motor Drive controller.

but what these parts are doing around here I've got no idea H 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. We've got some uh, test connectors, test pads going on down in there, so there we go.

That's for maybe the floppy Drive alignment or something. who 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 um, I'm probably not going to take the rest of it apart because the only thing we've got on the back side is just the display and the buttons.

and well, I'm not. You know that that doesn't really gain us much info I mean we've already seen that the motor uh controller is um on here, so really, you know. So I'm pretty darn happy with this T microscope. Actually, it's you know it works really well.

I've got my tilt swivel monitor up here and I can direct view out of the microscope as well as capture it. I've just got my capture button here I just hit that and I've got my uh Samsung uh, go mic hooked up on top of here and it all just records and fantastic winner. Few more little touches I need a a DVI or HDMI 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 tear down the Sony Mika MVC Fd7 one of Sony's first practical digital cameras and save to Floppy Drive Fantastic back in its day I Love it and well, that's what's inside it. The Marcha 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, uh, quite decent to replace your film camera with. So there you go, Hope you enjoyed it.

As always there will be uh, te highres um, tear down photos at Eev blog.com that'll be linked in down below. and also if you want to discuss it, the best place to do it is the EV blog forum and links down below for that as well as always. And if you like the video, please give it a big thumbs up. Catch you next time.

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