Hi welcome to Tear Down Tuesday Yes I Couldn't even be bothered putting my ugly head on camera. Let's jump straight into it. It's a leftover mailbag item from several, uh, weeks back. It's the JVC IO um low-end Very low-end uh consumer camcorder? What is it? It's the model number Gz Hm300 SE and uh, it comes from uh, a viewer called Mr Zed he wanted to remain anonymous.

otherwise his parents are very cruel indeed and uh, it's had a little accident with uh, gravity there. So yeah, oops, but it does actually still work Tada it's going to power on. there it is. and we do actually get an image out of the thing eventually.

So uh, there we go. let's have a look. Yeah, we Zoom right in there we go. There's my other camcorder right there and we'll be able to compare the two.

Here we go. This is my uh B-roll uh camera as it's called my second camera here in the lab. It's the uh Canon uh Legria HFM 400. It's got the same HD Cosos Pro sensor as what I'm shooting with here.

this little camera uh, which is the Canon HF G10 which is bigger than this one. uh again, so you can really see the compact uh size of this little JVC Absolutely. So let's crack this sucker open I think we might need the set of Jeweler screwdrivers for this one and I had a about this in the mail bag. look at this nonstandard pain in the ass son of a power connector that some at JBC uh marketing department thought that they would design into this thing should be hung drawn and quarted the Bastards Unbelievable.

So anyway, how do we get uh into the this sucker? I think uh, looks like we they look like little uh to oh no, they're Phillips yep they are Phillips screws. We should be able to get in there. there's a couple of screws on the bottom I don't know I've never taken a part one of these camcorders. uh before.

really. So let's uh, rip it open and uh I expect to see inside here. The sensor is going to be like right back in here cuz most of the um, most of these things are taken up with the zoom range. I mean this has got a 20 times optical zoom so in fact, if we pair it on, you can probably see the uh there we go.

We can see the lens actually move all the way back right into that so that's going to have quite a significant uh range of movement inside there. So I expect the sensor to be back here somewhere on these things. That's what most of the length in these are taken up for. So yeah, let's whip the screws open and uh, see what technology inside here I think it's only like a year or two old so it's pretty modern.

um I'd expect uh uh, lots of um, very uh, lots of high level of Um system on chip integration and uh, stuff like that. of course built down to an absolute price I mean this is you know, a bottom of the range consumer camera, a couple hundred doar worth at best or something like that. So interesting to see what makes this tick although look at that isn't that advanced. SD card slots W that's something that my, uh, only my Pro uh Canon cameras have got w why bother? Yeah, dual memory.

there it is. should have read that. Do let's go. So this is a size zero Phillips I've got here and uh, don't know how many uh screws we're going to need, but it's going to be quite a few.

No doubt there'll be a hidden bastard somewhere which will stop me from really getting the whole thing apart First go. So uh, but the design of these like the 3D just the you know 3D uh, designing the uh cases and all this in 3D and the housings and how it all fits together and the integration of the electronics just um, really highlights. uh, the need for uh, you know, cross team cross design. uh, team and cross discipline.

Um, work in the you know, in in a designing a consumer product like this I mean I've been involved in uh, many cross-discipline design teams that involve, you know, um, electronics designers like me, mechanical, uh, designers, production designers, and uh, uh, you know, even a graphic artists would have been involved in this. User interface designers all sorts of, uh, weird and wonderful and wacky people have gone into this I'd Love have to know the design, the size and makeup of a design team for a consumer product in a company like JVC If anyone uh does work in such a consumer electronics uh design team, please give us the uh low down. oh I got a couple of different uh, that looks that was like a different size screw down in there that bottom one um, who cares? I'm not putting this thing back together so I don't really care about uh, keeping tabs of where they came from. but yeah, if anyone works at a a large consumer electronics company on the um, like this on these sort of uh things, then please give us the Uh Lowdown on what you know, uh, the makeup of your of a typical design team cuz I I Find that sort of aspect of engineering quite fascinating really.

So it's uh, it's one of the more fun things. um, one of the more satisfying things that I've uh uh done in my career is work with, uh, you know, lots of work across disciplines on a project that has, you know there'll be Optical people of course working on these. This thing's Optical specialist, who knows, they might have even, uh, farmed out the um Optics to well, that's a con and manota lens actually. I'm not sure of the association with JBC and Kik and manala.

they probably JBC might own them or something like that I don't know, haven't looked I'm just uh, talking out my ass here. but uh yeah, there's lots of oh, there we go. Something's happening there. Lots of cross disciplined stuff happening here.

Let's get that strap off and uh, probably custom Asic in this or Asic or two probably shared across uh, multiple lines like for instance, they doing the uh Canon for for example the famous would be the digic uh processors and stuff like that. they use the same processor, they develop that one a and then uh, use it across multiple uh camera lines. For example, in terms of like the still uh camera lines I'm talking about oh, there we go. See, we got a piece, came off see somebody had to design that.

you know they had to get all that right. 3D model that and everything. put it all in place, make sure it all works and you know, get that and and do this within like the typical uh, what you know 9 month development, uh, cycle time of something like this. Absolutely incredible.

We can see the uh see the flex going in there. It's obviously a Serial uh interface going over to this screen. Of course you know you wouldn't be able to have a huge parallel interface going over, so it looks like you know they've probably just got single power there. like 3.3 or 5 volts and then just a couple of uh, serial lines going across to drive that.

uh LCD So it looks like we got a quite a a few more screws as we get through the case of this thing. So I will I think stop the camera and uh, try and prize this off. Here we go. It looks like this top piece is going to SL is going to sort of Le Oh yeah, there we go.

Lever off just uh. plastic retaining clips and all that. Of course. nothing special with this cheap uh with this plastic.

just really flimsy cheap ass, uh, consumer stuff it's You know, it's probably not a high quality impact resistant, uh, polymer or something like that. and uh, it doesn't look like to be uh, uh, shielded or anything like that. and oh, Bingo You know we start getting all the exposed parts and there you go. We can start seeing the uh, the main one main flat board down in there.

We're going to get lots of flat flexs of course. oh no, there could be some look at that. We got some shielding tape. um, some copper tape coming across here which is, uh, screwed into that what looks like that plastic there and uh, so possibly theyve no, that's a no that goes off to another metal shielded thing so the Plastics aren't uh, haven't got any shielding in them RFI uh shielding.

But yeah, we have the one board with what looks like a uh, a test connector down in there. There we go. Who knows what that's for that didn't attach to. you know, this just sits on top like that.

Oh like that. So obviously that's not connected to anything test/ programming connector. There's looks like there's a header for another connector down on there. They haven't uh populated that we're going to see.

lots of flat. Flex Of course this flat Flex here is just uh for looks like the snapshot button and the Uh Zoom control up there. That's about about it. Nothing fancy.

We've got another flat Flex going off here to something up the top. here. Is that possibly the well? No, that's like an infrared cover. So that could be like an infrared uh receiver or something like that.

Yeah, that would be. my guess is that uh is an infrared receiver down in there I could get out the uh zoom lens and take a look at that. There we go. That's that flat.

Flex uh. cable up front. two pin part there. yeah, looks like a uh, a photo diode photo transistor there.

There's only the two leads going off there down to the board. so you know. Look, they've gone to the effort you've got to design. You know, somebody had to design all this flat.

Flex cable and uh, that would be a separate soldering production process just for that. And then you've got the mounting plastic mounting bracket here. All of this has to be designed. It's incredibly complex.

I'm trying to if the leave of the front lens cover off and uh, that's you know, everything is a separate part. Absolutely incredible. You know you think they could have maybe just mounted it on the side of the board there and just shifted the uh window over a bit. You know, instead of having like the window here, they could have you know, put the window on the side here.

but then it wouldn't have been. you know, nice and sexy and symmetrical looking. you know, down the center line of the things. So but that would have saved you know, designing the mounting bracket and the flat flex and the separate Uh assembly process and all that by just you know, side mounting that vertically on that on that board as part of your assembly process for that board.

So you know decisions like that that may have been driven by the you know, um, the engineers may not have had a choice, it may have. You know the concept, the artist who you know, the industrial designer or something came up with the concept. Oh yeah, here's our infrared window here. It looks beautiful.

It's in the center line like this, and you know, tough titties to the actual designers. They've got to go in there and you know, be able to mount that there when they know that their board's over here and they go Bummer. They get to that point in the design, uh, process where they just you know. Oh, our board's over here.

But everyone, the decision's been made to put our window here. We have to design all that in. Oh blah blah blah. Man, sometimes your hands are just tied in the design process and the same thing's happen with this microphone board.

I've taken the front, uh, front connector off. You can see the grills for the Uh mics down here. Obviously, stereo mics have got two of them. or they, you know, um, or they appear to have two of them.

anyway. and those mics are on this on their own flat. Flex board. Let's take that out.

They've got little, hey, they've uh, put that on a rubber mount, a rubber surround to isolate handling noise, so that's actually pretty good on a a low-end consumer one like this. That's not bad at all. They've isolated those in their own little rubber shock mount. Look at that.

Rather neat I Like that, that is. Uh, and they do actually have Jewel um, uh, electric mic. uh, inserts there and bingo off. They go on their own flat, flex and everything else and you know they've done.

They've done that because they they have the rubber little isolated shock mount there and that's that's rather good. You know, a bit of thoughts gone into that they haven't. Uh, this one isn't really one of those one hung low cheapies. Not really surprising considering it's uh JVC even one of their bottom of the range cameras.

And you'll note the uh little stiffening little clear fiberglass type uh, stiffening plate they've glued on the back of that uh flat Flex cable there just to give the uh just to give the rigidity in that I mean there's quite a bit of flex that's actually probably less flexible than a uh, an equivalent like a 0.8 mm fiberglass board or for that sort of uh, length. but yeah, nice little touch there. So let's take this side cover here off. Looks like there's two extra screws in here and that should.

Tada And check this plate out here. They've designed in this separate plate mounted in with a separate uh screw. It's going to have its own molding, its own assembly step, and the sole purpose of that is the retaining hook. that black retaining hook for that.

I mean you know what? they couldn't put that into the case or I mean maybe this outer case a totally different uh type of plastic and uh, was going to, you know, wouldn't have done uh, the business so they had to use maybe this uh, plastic in here I'm not sure what uh type it is got a number two on there. whatever that means If you know Plastics that it might actually no Here we go. This is a PC ABS uh plastic. So um yeah I don't know all that effort just to put in a little retaining clip and they've done it over here for something else.

Complete separate molding process just to retain that door. man. Why? And that board has nothing but the dual SD card slots. couple of little bypass caps on there.

That's about it. You got to have uh, that. but yeah, it's its own assembly and then uh, a flat Flex ribbon going over to the main board so it looks like we just have the one. We're going to have just the one main processor board in here.

We're going to have the Optics in the center here. and uh, really? um, that may? Well, there's going to be a sensor board at the back I Can see a board in there. Um, it's going to have the battery contacts as well. I'm not sure if it's got the sensor on it, but uh, maybe the sensor inside more likely inside connected via another flat.

Flex Ribbon or something like that can see some more ribbons down in there. Um, so let's whip this board off. We're getting closer and closer to the main board and of course, there's probably little to know thought put into the uh. servicing of these things.

I Mean these are throwaway, uh, consumer item cameras? Um, no, there we go. that's a jewel. Uh Jewel sided load there. Well, they had to do the je sided load anyway.

I Was going to say why bother put in the Uh caps on that side there when uh, uh, everything's when you had to put uh components on the back. They got some termination resistors on there I won't bother zooming into that couple of unpopulated parts and uh, a few other bypass caps and that's had its own testing or something done. There's a mark on there and uh, what is that? That's some sort of, is that a uh lever contact switch? Ah that's probably the door clo. No, it's not the door closed switch.

What is that? That is a looks like a grounding contact? Over to this yet another flat Flex just dedicated to the record button there. They love their flat flex stuff, but really I mean it's the only viable way to design consumer products like this into a certain uh usable form factor. They've been doing this since um a like I can remember. You know, the Polaroid instant uh cameras back in the uh, late 70s, um early 80s or whatever they had, um, use of flat Flex technology in very early um, uh, you know, uh, regular film cameras that might have had some um Electronics um in them small amount or flat Flex designed to uh, enable these consumer form factors.

We've got ourselves some RFI uh shielding foam there just to join, uh, this metal piece down in here with uh, something on the side of the case and that's the top Zoom mechanism there. It's got its own, uh, all the own assembly Mount goes off to the ribbon over here and uh oh, that's all integrated into one. the zoom and the snapshot and the Uh and the record button. that'll be all the one solid um, piece of flat flex no pun in solid.

Yeah, one flat piece of flat flex and we can see some uh, multi-way ribbon going down in there. That's probably the Uh sensor, although there's another one down there. So yeah, it's in there somewhere. And we've got ourselves a couple of uh light pipes there which just made up with surface mount LED down on the board down in there.

nice so they haven't had to wire that over on a separate uh flat. Flex Very common to get these sort of uh light pipes so you can mount your Um LED cheaply on your board right back out there and then direct the light out anywhere you want and looks like this whole side panel pulls away and T there is our main board with a flat Flex joining the too couple of little tiny uh BGA on there we'll take a look at. up close, there's some uh, flat Flex going behind there for some of the joining some of the Uh Optics down in here, there's some sort of sensor down there. there's a sensor at the front there that comes apart really quite easily I Rather like that, but um I mean this could be a double-sided uh load there.

We're not sure we'll have to take that uh board out, but uh, not a huge amount on there really. I Was expecting a much larger BGA device than what's on there. so I can't see a larger BGA device on the bottom cuz there's no Telltale like bypass caps on this side of the board or anything like that. Someone has had a a little go on there with the old texture.

There's the backup battery down in there. sold it onto the board. Not user replaceable. All part of the uh consumerism of this, but that that's actually a lot thinner than I Thought that Optical uh mechanism in there, but there you go.

I mean the sensors likely on, you know, way back here like this and all of that is your lens in um and zoom in system. So this is probably oh sorry, yeah, not a sensor. This is probably like your Zoom motor or something like that. So Zoom motor.

and what is there an iris motor in these sorts of cameras or something to that effect? So let's whip that apart further and I was right. There is a bigger huge JVC custom part down there that's there. Yeah, we'll have a look at that, but that's their uh you know, got all their whizbang uh technology in it and uh, it is a uh BGA So on the flip side, I Just saw I just thought that I'd see uh some more you know, an array of uh bypass Caps or something like that on there. but obviously you know little maybe a little Core Power Supply there or something like that.

there's a big inductor there, probably for one of the core voltages or something like that. but there you go. there's all the main chip set down in there. We got ourselves the speaker and uh, that is about all she wrote I got to get that pain in the ice off.

but you can see the complexity in the construction in these. It's absolutely incredible. I'm always amazed when I uh take apart uh, consumer items that are re that really have dense packaging like this I'm just always amazed at the construction, the complexity in construction which goes into these things. There we go Bingo that pops off off there.

got ourselves a little speaker connector there Tada it's out there. We go there. you go if that means anything to anyone. desel polymer haven't Googled that no Valoy is that the type of Uh polymer plastic used in the hinge? or you know, the mount in for the uh uh LCD hinge there I don't know and both our HDMI and Uh component inputs all go via this uh flat Flex cable over to the main board there so they're not mounted on the main board at all and you'll notice that the buttons on the side here actually aren't just uh, loose buttons going down the switches.

They've actually got a little uh, spring, uh plastic Spring Bar in there just to give them a bit more tactile feel I guess. And there's the uh tack switches right angle on the side of the board like that so they could have just got away with like loose caps. but uh yeah, they decided for uh, that uh, single molded, uh retention system. So I guess that kind of thing just makes it less, uh, fiddly.

You know, when you're uh, assembling these things, the operator who's assembling this doesn't have to dick around with. you know, four separate little buttons there, getting them around the right way and all sorts of stuff. They just drop in a much easier to handle um, single molded, uh, plastic insert like that. And there's the battery board.

It's got the USB interface as well. the power, that custom pain in the ass power connector up there. the Uh battery connector that's just surface mounted on there. that's going to be the Uh lithium ion battery charger.

not even going to bother decoding the part number on that thing rear PCB assembly Y and on the other side, then we've got the Uh Tax switch is as we saw. for those side buttons, we've got the Um headphone. uh Jack I Don't think this has an external Uh microphone input and uh, not much else. Look at that.

the G of the effort there to mount that led just on a slight, you know, 10 15 angle from the vertical like that just because I don't know. that's the you know, the light pipe sort of, you know, hat to fit in there and uh, all that sort of stuff. So you know the person who was laying out this board had to talk to the uh, industrial designer of the uh light pipe and the case and the all sorts of things. It's just, you know, a lot of effort you'd be surprised goes into just selecting the angle of that Led on the PCB layout.

Lots of flow on effects from somebody, uh, deciding up uh, you know, the food chain or across the food chain. uh, deciding that they want the LED in a particular uh spot on the case flows right down to the PO CB layout person. And there's the main custom Asic It's the HT Giga brid not Giga bird um Giga brid whatever that means. Um, it's the premium 2 uh chipset.

That's what this Uh camcorder is advertised as having and that does all the image, uh, processing and all the fancy pancy stuff. Totally custom Asic developed by JVC presumably just like um, you know all the major manufacturers Canada and everyone else designed their own uh custom chipsets and they, you know, try and compete against each other. Oh, we've got the new series. three of the uh, you know, the digi chipset or whatever or the Giga brid.

You know, who knows. the latest JBC cameras probably have the Giga brid, Premium 4 or something like that. Uh, who knows. I Don't keep up.

So an absolute metric buttload of engineering R&D and uh, money goes into designing these chipsets so they want to use them across as many models as possible. So this same chipset is, probably, you know, hugely over engineered for uh, this base model. you know, $200 entry level. uh, camcord it's probably used in.

Well, was used back in 2010 when this thing was released. uh, back in there. Um, high-end models as well, so probably much more capable and has features that are not enabled in this particular model camcorder. And there's a Sony 6m 37 and a quick Google of that.

Didn't give me me the data sheet, but it got me another data sheet for some LCD panels or an application. uh, sort of note which shows that this is a single chip uh LCD panel driver and no surprises considering that the LCD connector is uh, smack on the back there. so that's what driving our panel via that flat Flex cable there. and as you can see, the flat Flex cable is uh, very dense down in there, the uh Trace uh pitch in there, very dense and it goes to a um widens out to a wider pitch flat Flex connector.

and there you have it. There's a little bit of an app Note there showing the Uh single chip driver Cmx 37 in in the middle. It just takes the sync signals and the RGB yuv Um signals and the serial data and just drives the panel directly. So clearly this chipset is only designed for like these uh low-end um LCD panels you know 123k do or 200k Dot um panels which you get on the very low-end uh cheap ass camcorders.

I mean what I'm filming with at the moment? The Canon HF G10 it's got near a million Uh dots on it so you know quite a high resolution screen so would' be using a much higher end chipset. And here's the Texas Instruments THS 8136 and that's a video deck. So what they're doing is the Uh processor down in here is you know it's getting all the stuff uh digital from the sensor. Then it's using the video Deck Down in here to generate an analog RGB type signal which then goes into the Uh panel um Sony panel chip over here we saw and dries the panel so they go from digital from the sensor back into Old School analog and then to to drive this chipset over here.

you know it's it seems crazy but uh, obviously they've decided. Well that was the uh, you know, the cheapest, uh, best solution available for driving that LCD panel I mean this uh chipset. In theory they could have integrated this Asic if they smart could have integrated the Uh driver directly for the LCD panel in it or used another LCD panel which was just uh, driven by uh, by the digital direct. you know, serial or parallel data out from here, could have you know gone into some uh, direct digital uh panel driver instead of converting it to analog.

um, old school analog signal. but eh. and we got ourselves a little tactile lever switch there, which obviously uh is designed to detect something whether or not it's like a case open or something like that. I'm not sure I've taken all all the bits apart I'm not actually sure what was uh, making contact and making contact there now and we could go into detail on all the other uh Parts on here.

there's a little uh BGA down in there. this is probably some sort of um RTC or something like that cuz that looks like possibly a 32 khz uh Crystal there? perhaps? although it could be higher. who knows what these are doing? I could, uh, in fact AK that seems like audio I can look that one up AK 4694 Nope. I got absolutely zip on that one folks.

and uh, I don't know what? uh, that texture scroll in there means your guess is as good as mine. And yeah, by all means, uh, go look these up. but nothing terribly exciting to write home about and we just got more power stuff around here. You can tell by all the large tracers.

large inductors are always a dead giveaway. Some sort of, you know, some sort of regulator in there low Dropout regulator perhaps? No, we're getting into the Obscure uh numbers down here. and uh, there's curiously a lot of passive parts around here. Look at all these resistors.

so not sure what that puppy's doing there at all now folks. As predicted, the sensor was all the way back right at the end here. Of course, they're going to maximize all that for the optical. all that distance there for the optical zoom.

The sensor is on this board did giveaway. You can see some BGA balls or you can see something down in there which is going right in the center line. That's obviously going to be the uh surface mount sensor on the bottom there. It's all rather complex how this comes apart.

Look at all that complex mold in there, which goes over all that with all the cutouts for all the flat flexors. What? I Hate to have been the system design engineer on something like this. Absolutely terrible. But there you go.

We're getting down into the main sensor now. and the Optics And here we go folks. We have ourselves the sensor on the back here. Is that a Uh I'm going to presume that that might that looks like a heat heat sink.

Like a heat spreading plate acting as a heat sink. You can tell by the the sensors obviously under there like a BGA sensor or a reverse Mount uh sensor. it might have a hole in the well. It's got to have a hole in the front side of the board.

Actually, if it's mounted on this side of the board, there'll be a square cut out in the front of that board and the sensor will be mounted on the back like that and this is obviously attached to the back of the Uh Dy on that thing and just spread in the heat out. Cuz these things do operate quite quick and they uh do pump out a lot of data so this sucker is clearly designed to minimize the heat on that. Oh oh no, there we go. I was wrong.

It's H there, it is, um, probably a BGA Mount sensor on the front. They've got a thermal pad Expos there and the Heat and of course that just uh acts as a heat sink so it's still acting as a heat sink. but the chip is actually mounted on the front and if we Zoom right into that we'll be able to see some micro V on there. Let's have a look There you go.

Look at those little micras in there designed to uh get the heat from one side of the board to the other tiny little things .1 mm or something like that. if we take that back in plate off, we should be able to see the sensor. Tada There it is, folks. So there's the ass end of the lens down there and uh, that just uh sits over the sensor plate in the back.

Simple. and there's our D check it out, you can see the Uh Gold Bond wires going right over. This is using my X 10 macro lens by the way, if people are wondering how I shoot this, I'm using an Opt Teer high definition X 10 macro lens on my Cannon camera and for the close-up shots I just screw that in and uh, we can see how dying there beautifully. So yeah, I'm assuming that's like a Seos sensor probably says so in the specs, haven't checked and that board's actually uh, gunked down in there.

you can see the gunk down there. There you go, someone's uh, gone around with the hot snot and actually embedded that in there, but that looks like a leadless uh chip carrier. It's not actually a BGA one. you can see the pins on the outside of that.

Fairly typical. It's not a huge uh pin count device as you can see by number of the uh tracers coming here. It's basically uh, serial data coming out of this thing I believe Or it could be four. You know it could be like 8 bit parallel or something like that.

Not entirely sure, but yeah, that one is gun in there I Won't even bother taking that out. There's nothing interesting to see on there, it's just a sensor and we can see one of the motors down in there. maybe the iris motor and the one up there. probably the Zoom motor all connected via that flat flex and they've got something else over here which I don't think's another uh, well, it might be another motor I don't know if we take the side plate off there Tada we can see inside the lens mechanism beautifully look at that.

they they've got the fixed lens on the front which has uh, had a issue with gravity there. we've got a another lens in there which moves so obviously those two uh Motors all they do it. there's no like um Iris uh motor or you know anything like that, it's not like it's uh I thought I would have expected actually where is the iris I not actually I don't think it has one. no.

anyway I don't know I'm not a huge uh camera buff fan and how all these Optics work, but clearly we got two movable lenses here. a fixed one in the well, fix one at the front, fix one in the center, and then two movable lenses here which are controlled by must be controlled by these two separate Motors So I'm not entirely sure like you know one's going to be the zoom like that's going to be the zoom there I probably shouldn't be uh doing that ratcheting that uh, uper down. There's a little worm screw down in there right? that's driven directly from the uh motor. There'll be one down here as well.

So one's going to be uh, well, you know a combination of these works on the zoom and the uh Focus so that's probably you know I' I'd say you know that's the zoom mechanism and that's the focus mechanism. But like I said I don't know a huge amount about uh uh, these types of uh Optics so combination of them are going to work. so maybe we can actually with the camcorder here we can actually look through this and uh, see if we can actually, uh, focus on something. Give it a go anyway.

and here it is. Check it out folks. I've got my second camera set up here and I've got uh, the target PCB over here which is the PCB from the camera and you can see that uh, using my Times 10 macro lens here I'm able to get an image Focus quite nicely through that. Now if I adjust the rear one that has some Zoom capability but that's also focus in and the front one here that really has a huge difference.

Check that out. So it's a combination of the two of them there that gives us that image. look at that and that's even through the uh, distorted uh well, the cracked lens and everything else. Not bad at all.

And if I move the forward lens, uh, it's all the way back at the moment. So if I move the forward lens forward a bit, watch this. We'll be able to then focus on our lens. There's our lens.

There's our cracked and chipped lens on the front of this thing. Not a problem at all. so you could go into all your Optical uh, Theory and all that of exactly what uh uh lenses I've got what focal lengths and everything else I've got here and all that sort of stuff. but that is pretty neat.

I can then focus on that front lens. look at that I Love it. Nice. So it would be possible to sort of hack one of these zoom lenses from a camcorder onto and existing uh sensor.

any sort of probably any sensor you uh wanted really CU if it was uh, if the sensor was flat on the uh on the back of it uh, like this, just like the the Uh sensor was for uh in the actual original unit itself, then not a problem. You could use these lenses provided you get all the focal lengths and everything else right. And that other thing down here I was right. it is a sensor.

There we go. We just got a photo sensor down in there, probably to detect the Uh end of the Uh Zoom range. So these are actually very, uh, simple systems. really when it comes down to it, just uh two movable lenses in there and uh, two fix lenses and that's it.

and that uh screen is just held in place by a couple of screws there and there, and um, under a removable cover on the end there and it should just ah, Uncp somehow and that really was quite aggressively, uh, clipped into there. But we can see we have our LCD panel. There's uh, not much on the back of that. Here's a touchcreen, uh, sorry, a um, a capacitive uh touch controller which goes through that flat Flex up to the Uh board on the front here which then has all these uh, capacitive touch switches and a capacitive slider.

and yes, folks, marketing have got a hold of this. It's laser touch operation and as you move your finger, it's got LEDs that, uh, light up that whole strip like that, what a wank and that board is actually uh, adhesiv down on there. real pain so we'll rip that out and TDA There we we go. Well, the LEDs actually, um, were shining through somewhere else.

They're not actually on this board, they just shine through these slots and there's only four levels there, really. But uh, there is the capacitive uh pads on these things. There's the capacitive touch pad so there's only four pads there so you slide your finger along like that. and the capacitive touch buttons and the controller there.

No surprises. Uh Cyprus One of the big players in the touch Market that's a Cy 5c. it's a 2324 Capsense PS o controller and once again, someone at the Uh Factory has written some stuff on here, presumably after uh testing so that folks is all that is left of our poor camcorder. I Hope you found that uh interesting I Always find these consumer items fascinating as I uh talked about earlier in the video just from a a design point of view on the systems engine engineering team that goes into making all of these 3D molds and designing the whole system integration.

and you got your Lent Optics people and you got your Um ASC people who designed the Uh processing Asic and you've got ah, you know, got your marking in people with your laser bloody Touch system and everything else and they are really extraordinarily um, complex bits of Kit really And it's amazing that they can sell these for like you know, $200 uh retail? I mean you know the retailer is getting you know, 40% of that or something and uh then the then the wholesaler and that you know these are popping out of the factory at you know, well under a hundred bucks you know? So I don't know what sort of uh, volume they have to, uh you know, do up they have to commit to up front to you know, get these to meet these sort of, you know, really demanding consumer uh, price points, maybe the margins on these are a lot, uh, lower than, uh, a lot of of other items, perhaps. but you know. Look, you know if I was designing a product and I went I've got to mold this into it and I've got to do all these flexes. You know there's like half a dozen at least.

or a dozen little flat Flex cables and assemblies and everything else just inside a simple um, camcorder like this. It's just it's just crazy. I Would you know I'd blow my R&D budget. Just you know, getting somebody spec, assembling and building that bloody thing.

it's crazy. I don't know because I've I've been. That's the difference between the Consumer Electronics uh, design industry and the industrial one which I've primarily been involved in uh, all of my career. Essentially, I've never worked on, uh, consumer items like this before.

Yeah, I've done volumes in the uh, hundreds. a couple hundred thousand for a particular uh board or something like that. so almost, sort of. you know, almost getting up to that, uh, really, uh, consumer level volume.

but it's just. it's a different ball game to, you know, shaving off every scent and being a a massive corporation like JVC who, uh, commit to and churn out these designs and they designed so many models of them, it's just incredible. So there you go. I hope you found that fascinating I certainly did.

So thank you Mr Zed for uh, sending that one into the mail bag and if you want to discuss it, jump on over to the EV blog. Forum That is the best place to hang out and do it and if you like tear down Tuesday Please give it a big thumbs up. Catch you next time.