Hi welcome to Tear Down! Tuesday And if you're wondering why the video and audio quality is so awful on this video, you'll find out in a minute cuz we're doing a tear down of the world's shittiest camcorder. Thanks to Bob who sent this in uh, he's on the EV blog Forum sent into the mailbag segment I'll link it in down below if you haven't seen it. if you can even see or hear me cuz the quality is going to be so awful on this thing. Oh man.

I haven't watched it yet but I know it's going to be bad anyway. I asked if people wanted to actually see inside and for me to do a tear down of the world's shittiest Camc. and surprisingly everyone said yes I Want to see inside this steaming pile of dog turd? So okay, here we go: Tear down of the world's shittiest camcorder. Let's go back to my good camera.

So thanks to Bob who is Rjk 5388 on the evev blog for? uh, for sending this into the mailbag and well, you guys wanted it. So you're going to get the world's shittiest cam cord up. Tear Down! How is this thing? Well Bob got it for free and apparently they give these things away and look, the bezel has even fallen off already. Look what a steaming pile of dog turd.

Unbelievable. But you can buy this on Amazon for $750 plus shipping Shipp cost more than the actual freaking camera. Unbelievable. Um, and it gets three star rating.

Three stars on Amazon.com and it goes for $44 on Deal Extreme website and where it gets a four star rating? Are you me? This thing makes my skin crawl. The quality of the Plastics this uh, hinged mechanism feels like it's out of a World War II freaking tank or something. and that's not in a good sense in terms of just being. oh, it's absolutely ridiculous.

And ah, the quality of plastics. the shitty lens in there. of course, not even going to be glass, it's just going to be some crappy poly carb. They can't even drill the holes right for the bloody microphone down there and it's all just bodged together.

It is truly truly awful. Works on three AAA batteries in there and it's oh, it's just shocking. but I can turn it on and it does actually work as you just saw in the intro. Yes, I did actually shoot it with this thing and this is in the good light here in my lab.

so you know with my good regular studio lights actually turned on Bloody Bezel. Ah, heap of garbage. but look, it's um, it. it can shoot up to 3 megapixel.

Stills And oh, there we go. There's a photo I just uh, took with the thing. and if we go into here, we can actually call up the menu. Look at this.

Actually, they bothered to have a menu 640x480 or 320x 240 I shot this thing into the six. The high quality 640 by 480 mode frame rate is either 30 frames per second or 60 frame or sorry, 15 frames per second. Take your pick. Fantastic! And I don't even know why they bother to have the metering stuff in there and the white balance cuz it's just a load of absolute garbage.

So what is the damn point? I Don't get it. Oh anyway, the thing is bloody goodbye. Yeah goodbye. We're going to tear your ass apart and see what's inside this thing because I'm so angry.

I've got to do this. tear down. But the people wanted it. The people voted the world's shittiest Camore the man.

Manual's actually pretty good. It's a global brand by the way. The part number is DV 136 ZB Um, so you can actually still buy this thing. It's not like 10 years old or anything.

it really is this bad. but the manual I've seen better I've SE worse manual? sorry on on really? You know, name brand products. so just amazing. and it's all in English Of course it doesn't.

There doesn't seem to be too much Chinglish in here. They've actually done fairly well on the manual. I Can't believe it. Look at this.

3 megapixel res or 5 megapixel resolution. Oh, you got to be me. But oh, this thing is so bad. but I'm amazed.

That's pretty good. There we go. They claim an F 3.1 uh lens on the thing. No optical zoom of course.

it's just crappy. four times digital. 1.8 in TFT as you can saw I'm not sure what the resolution is, but what is it? 128x 64 or something? Not even that. Oh man, this is so crap.

do I have to? All right everyone. ask for it Here we go tear down of the world's shittiest camcorder. Well that Bezel is the first thing to come off because well, it's already fallen off. What a complete load of garbage.

I don't know. There's one screw in the bottom. it's probably all that holds it. A couple of screws, maybe two screws clip on there.

it does have USB and AV out. Oh why would you bother? The quality is just awful as you saw and oh as I said the quality of the Plastics and the bill construction. you just have to hold this thing to just feel how bad it is. My got to go wash my hands and I just feel so dirty using my top quality Weir screwdriver on this thing to open it.

In fact, the screwdriver costs more than the freaking camcorder. Unbelievable. Anyway, what are we going to see inside this thing? Well, Absol it's going to be a single chip solution. they I'd be surprised if they even bother with freaking bypass caps on the thing.

they're probably taking out. They probably design it and then take out the bypass caps until it barely works and then, uh, put it back together because well, you got to save that 0.001 cents or something like that. oh is so bad. Anyway, yeah I expect like a single chip solution Absol like the chip is probably the sensor and everything else would be so crap.

I mean you know we're talking basically webcam. here. it's basically a one of the you know, a crappy uh VGA 640x480 webcam stuck in a thing with a bit of, you know firmware bodged onto it to make it uh, you know, into a camcorder. but H let me try and prize this thing apart I won't waste any more time I'll just crack it open.

So here it comes, it's coming apart. By the way, as I showed in the previous video, yes, this macro switch does actually uh, work and it was able to macro focus on this. oh should I just bloody RI this turd. oh anyway, the bill of materials cost is going to be bugger all in this.

oh that's just oh I don't care Really? I really don't care? look oh it's yeah. I think this one actually has um, internal like 32 Meg of flash memory or something like that. But there we go. There it is and I'm absolutely stunned that they bothered to Gunk down look the wires.

the power wires into the board. They've gunked them down. Wow. An extra production step they didn't need to do.

Unbelievable. actually. quite a few passives and bypasses in there. but look at this main bypass cap here.

just bodged on. They obviously couldn't get the surface mount in this production run at the Shenzen Bloody Market, so they couldn't get it that day so they had to rush out to the store. you know, a a couple of stores up and buy. you know, these leaded RB electrolytics to whack in there instead.

Oh well. I'll tell you what, it's actually not as bad as I thought it would be. Look, they've even gone uh to the effort to put a a tally light on the front. what's called a tally light which indicates that it's actually on and recording.

even my Canon Hfg10 I'm shooting with now I wish it had a bloody tally light on the thing. but anyway, just a couple of other uh, crappy leads in White leads as a uh as a um fill light for the video feel light you can turn off and on. and uh yeah, there's the shitty little speaker. we'll rip that out.

but once again, yeah, look, they've gone to Gunk they've gone and gunked up the wires. Unbelievable that they did that attention to detail that's clearly the audio uh driver chip down there for the speaker. couple of crystals around there. main uh, blobbed chip is probably a blobbed part maybe or a quad flat pack or something.

uh, obviously mount on the other side side of the board. But we have ourselves our flash memory here so the the flash memory is probably the bulk cost of this thing and that's actually quite reasonable. Uh Riser Board construction there? I Don't mind that at all. with you know, a decent looking board to board interconnect down in there.

that's you know, they've done a half reasonable job, especially for the price. Geez, you know it's still a still the world's shittiest camcorder. But yeah, who, whoever designed this is at least knows somewhat what they're doing. Shame, it's just complete in terms of uh, specs and the crappy webcam uh, camera that they've put in this thing.

But apart from that, in terms of actually physically, uh, the design, uh, construction, the system part of it. Not too bad. I Mean you know, horrible mistakes like of course, the tri you can't access the battery compartment or the SD card when the Tripod's plugged in, but even some big name brands have that sort of issue. But yeah, I don't know.

I Expected A bit cruder and I'm surprised they've screwed this board down. If they're really smart and saving every scent, you wouldn't bother with that operation where you got to screw the screws in like that. you just have the board wedged in place between the two plastic halves or something like that. so there's There's quite a few extra little uh steps in here that they didn't really need to do.

And when you're actually designing something like this, don't really give much thought to the fact that oh, you know, optimize the absolute lowest cost. Not like they're making a pH iPhone They probably did a run of 50,000 of these things at the Shenzen market or something like that. I Have no idea who Global is, but I don't even know if it's theirs. It could be uh, somebody else's but yeah, so they probably didn't worry about the screws thought, oh, whatever oneoff cost, we not going to engineer the thing anymore to make it wedge the board in place.

So we have to do without screws and stuff like that. Labor's still pretty cheap here in China we'll just whack in some screws. she'll be right. Oops, sorry.

I Just realized I've been shooting this video up until now in LP mode on my camcar. I changed it uh uh before and I forgot to change it back. So if the video quality has been a bit garbage until now, that's the reason why and why it's suddenly come good. But how many orders of magnitude better than this pile of crap? Oh, don't think I can count that many ERS of magnitude on my one hand.

Here we go. I've undone those screws and let's there we go. Popped out on the bottom a look at that. So here's the board.

It just pulls off here. They got a nice little plastic spacer in there to keep that in place. As I said, that is really quite nice. Dual Bo Construction Sensor board.

There we go. Version 1.0 Yeah, they haven't bothered to revise it. There you go. Uh, Date Code: 28th of 7th, 2012.

That would be a design that's a design date. Okay, design that is not a manufacturer date. So as I said, this thing is not a 10-year-old pile of crap. It is designed to be a modern camcorder to meet some sort of Market need.

Well, I guess you know they sell sell them on Amazon for 750. Real tempting. and I have no idea what brand uh, webcam sensor that is obviously the crapp one they could get at the Shenzen markets this week. But anyway, that is the macro.

uh, switch there that went to the top of the unit. so that's what it was switching in. so it's just physically I Guess extending the lens inside or something like that. that's pretty much all it's doing because well, yeah, there's no, you know.

Optical uh, Zoom or any other Optics inside this thing. it's just a crap little uh, polycarbonate lens on the front straight into the sensor die. I've taking these screws off that they were held in place with compression. Springs and uh, there we go to.

uh, there's our sensor. die directly sold it onto the board there. What is that? a cute little Qfn package? or is that like a BGA package? But anyway, yeah, there's that is the uh thing responsible for the shitty performance of this thing. and well, I wonder what they get? What cost they get that die for? What would it be I mean would it you know, like 10 cents? not even I mean for a d of this, how do you even pick and place a Dye like that? by the way, does it come with like a plastic cover on top which or a film that they film? I I Would have thought that the pressure from the pick and place machine would have damaged the sensor? Maybe it has.

that's why it's so and there it is. if I uh, move it slightly a different angle to the light there you can see the see the Dy all the circuitry surrounding that and uh, that is that's doing a with my macro lens time 10 macro lens. that's making a good account of itself there and that's rather rather fascinating. but uh yeah.

I Think you can see the pads on the side there, so it's probably some sort of you know, Qfn type package. I Always like looking at dyes like that. getting them in the light it really is really is quite nice. Oh look at that, you can see the detail there.

Now that's just absolutely brilliant. I Love that. and I'm just very curious to shoot this on my Tagano microscope here. I'm yes, I'm just pointing the camcorder at the screen so you can probably see the screen.

Update: Uh, flicker there but uh I Just wanted to have a look what 30 times Optical magnification can do to that at that 200 odd Mill 250 mm working distance or something like that. Look at that! Fantastic. Oh that is that is terrific. That Tano microscope works really, really well.

Can't wait to capture the output of this thing. It'll be really good for tear downs and no, there you go. It's not a Qfn, it's a BGA look at that. You can even see the balls underneath there.

Yes, the world's shittiest camcorder has balls, huh? They're up to version 1.3 of the Main Board 2011. So the the main board is actually older than the main sensor and there's our main chipset there. We'll try and get some data on that and of course, some uh, memory. Just some operational memory for that thing.

So there's basically bugger all in this thing. Uh, Dome tactile switches. They will be the cheapest, crappiest quality possible. You probably only get 500 Cycles out of those little turds and uh, well, they haven't skipped on.

Look at that. There's a So 23 package. Ah, we don't don't need that So 23. Let's just put a zero.

Oh Jumper in there. Bob's your uncle, No worries. Wow. Test points.

They actually bother to test this thing I'm shocked and the chip is an SPCA 1528 A. And yes, I was able to find data on that thing comes from a company called Icatch and we'll take a look at the data sheet. but I'm not sure what that M symbol is. so is it Second Source Or or just you know, a copy? a clone of the G An Icatch chip? I Don't know.

So here it is: Icatch SPCA 528a Icatch in Technology for Digital Steel Camera Solutions This is the product. Uh, brief. It's not the full Uh data sheet. This is the first thing that popped up is an ideal lowcost.

uh, still so system on chip that features a full set of component standard digital camera system among these components: High quality image processing engine. Yeah. Shame about the lens, camera, and lens stuck onto the thing. High speed? uh.

Jpeg codec? Of course it's not MPEG uh, 4 or anything like that. It's just motion jpeg encoding for this thing, but it's probably capable of quite good results. It depends on which lens you actually uh, you know, made it with. uh.

basically it all comes down to the lens and the Optics. That's pretty much it in these things. I'm sure it does a reasonable job at the chipset level, and that's not the reason for the crap quality image in here. Anyway, it's Got U It's designed exactly for the purpose up to 5 megapix.

Uh, precise flash light control at pixel level? Yeah, right. Motion Jpeg at 30 frames per second on chip, TV encoder and TV da, it is a true single chip solution. As we suspected, inside this thing, it must be to get that cost down. So uh, it's got a font based onscreen display.

it's all there. Uh, it's got a general purpose ADC for measuring like the battery voltage just to get the battery uh, life and stuff like that to couple of timers. pwm um supports SD ram directly of course, nor flash memory that we saw uh and it supports the USB interface directly as well. And it's got a mono Pwm uh audio with external amplifier so that's what we saw in there.

We saw the external amplifier chip that was the only almost the only additional cost in this thing apart from the sensor and a couple of voltage RS and other miscellaneous passive stuffs. It's even got the on chip ADC for the microphone directly into it. no problem whatsoever. Lens shading correction doesn't matter a rat's ass in this thing.

and that's pretty much the world's shittiest block diagram. Oh goodness sake. So there you have it. That's pretty much it.

There's not much to it. single chip solution with external memory and just the audio driver and a couple of passives. So I I don't know the bill of materials? uh, bomb breakdown on the cost of this thing? Would the sensor board? Would the sensor itself be the most cost? It may not be. Um, so you know how much is the assembly? how much of the other parts? I Don't know.

Shittiest microphone on there of course I haven't done anything about VI anti vibration Mount or anything like that. of course not in this class of camera and the chipset. Well, you know it's designed specifically for the task. I'm not sure of the date.

uh, copyright 2010. There you go. This chip was designed in 20 and 10, not a L. you know, 3 4 years ago is not a long time really.

uh for something like this. So yeah, there's a market need out there for these shitty little camcorders and well ey Catch Technology designed a chip to meet it. Whether or not this is actually an icatch chip cuz what's this small M and Big M I Don't know. Um, is it you know, some clone chip or something like that that they um, bought you know for in a couple of I will buy a thousand trays of those at the Shen in Market No worries, we'll just whack them together.

They're a Tyrane company by the way. I Catch. So whether or not this one was actually made in Taiwan or China I have no idea it would have been assembled in China Almost? Uh, certainly. I Suspect and it's been.

Quality Control passed by number three good on your number three. What a winner! There you go. But oh yeah, jeez, I don't know. Certainly get what you pay for, but all of the performance in this thing is is that shitty little webcam sensor and well, whatever.

freaking Optics or I wouldn't even? no, no, that's an insult to call those Optics You can do better with just some Vaseline shoved down a hole in the bloody front of the camera. I think G And the other thing with this sort of Uh product is as we saw with the date code, this thing was designed in 201, uh, 11. The board. The chipsets from 2010.

This board is from 2012. So basically the base board's going to remain the same. but to keep this in production for a couple of years, they're just going to use whatever baseboard, whatever sensor they can find this week. literally.

uh, this week to put through a a run of you know, 10,000 of these things. So they might just respin that board in a matter of days or something like that and use whatever sensor they can get a hold of. But of course, that wouldn't have been the reason that they went for the jewel board. uh, construction there.

knowing that they'd have to maybe change the sensor board all the time. It's just the fact that, well, this one had to be horizontal with the lens sticking out the front and well, that camcorder shape. It dictates that this board had to be this shape, so they had to do the Uh. had to do the right angle solution like that.

But and I'm actually rather surprised at this. It's it's actually not. Apart from a shitty performance, it's actually you get quite a bit of value in your $750 in terms of the design, design, and construction. I mean the quality of the Plastics They're always going to skimp on the Plastics with these these cheap ass things.

But yeah. anyway. um yeah. I expected shabier and well, we got hey, half decent I Think it's worthy of a $30 camera very quickly.

There's the LCD board. yeah, they maybe got some stuff here for the uh, backlight and well, just the drive ribbon cable coming in and a couple of passes. nah, version one. And for those playing along at home, there's presumably the part number for the LCD.

There's the backing with the side mount leads there. Oh, mounted mounted on that. So we just peel the leads off there for, uh, backlighting this heaper turd. That is this to what they claim.

Do they claim it's a TFT display? I Don't know. Anyway, it's a pile of garbage and we're back on the Tagano microscope here having a look at the LCD display. There we go, you can see the ribbon cable uh coming in, the hot bar attachment there and uh hey, you can see little uh little logo. there Is it something like that? Anyway, going into the array which we might be able to what if we look on the other side n we got bugger.

all all the interesting stuff is on the bottom side. There There we go. So there you have it. That's a tear down of the world's shittiest camcorder.

You asked for it. You got it. H $750 Oh man. I wouldn't use this thing I Would rather go back to working for the man then continue my video blog shooting it using this camera.

That's how freaking bad it is. There's only one place for this and that is in the bin. How dare it pollute my lab And good riddens? That's one less shitty camera that can inflict crap quality content upon the world. huh? Thumbs down.

Catch you next time.