Hi Imagine it's in 1980s and you wanted to take an electronic photograph. No, not a digital photo, but an electronic photo I Eat not film. You wanted it to be able to display on either a computer or arms monitor. a TV or whatever.

You had to get one of these things. This is the Canon I on Still Video camera. This predates digital cameras. Now, before digital cameras came along, you had these what's called still video cameras.

And yes, Pal is the power of video format that you're familiar with. Because these things were not digital cameras, they actually took photos and stored them on. in this particular case. check it out.

Tada A two-inch what's called a video floppy. Now, these were actually invented by Sony In 1981, they actually came out with the first movie Kerr Camera not to be confused with the movie Kerr name you're familiar with. It does go in there. somehow.

the movie can aim you. Familiar with these days with the digital movie cameras that started out as a still Video camera, but they weren't really. It really wasn't a commercial success now. Canon came out with the first commercially successful really still Video camera, the RC 250.

This the model we're gonna tear down today is the RC 260, which this one came out in 1991 and is still basically an analogue camera. It stores still frames from a power video. So I've basically got a power video sensor like was used in not camcorders back in the day in here. but instead of storing it to a digital file format like JPEG or bitmap or something else, it's taught it as a frame from a Pal video.

and hence that's why this thing has video out and it just stored them and replayed them from these video floppy disks this one called the Vf50, presumably because you can store 50 still images on here and you've got to remember this is not a digital format floppy disk so you can't ask the question how much storage has it got. It doesn't like in bytes, it doesn't work like that. It stores analog Pal format video. So this particular one stored 50 photos of not the full power video standard.

It was about 300 lines, 320 lines resolution, so basically 300 odd pixels vertically and that's basically all you got and you got to remember the JPEG image format. It wasn't invented in 1991. It didn't come out and tall a wall wasn't ratified. The standard wasn't ratified until the mid 90s.

So these analogs still video cameras were basically the Darks carts. They were all you could pretty much do back in the late 80s early 90s digital cameras as we know them today storing to a JPEG format or whatever format didn't come around until the mid 90s and then really didn't take off until they towards more the end of the 90s. So yeah, this was it back then and the image quality is horrible. This particular one was sent in by Dave Ghana so thank you very much Dave He's from the Netherlands and This one still works.

So before we tear it down, let's power it up and see if we can get a selfie on this thing from a 1991 camera. Oh Get ready for this super quality. Check it out if I put it into playback mode and I plug the composite video output into my capture device. look I'm able to scroll through the different stored images.

There it is. Look at that. The world's oldest selfie? Is it no? that belongs to Buzz Aldrin I Believe. So there you go.

It works. A treat. I Mean you know there's some video capture issues in here and you know stuff like that, but gee, that's anyway. it's pretty crusty.

It is pal image quality exactly like you'd expect, but it's yeah, it's pretty horrendous even compared to like the first digital still cameras you. and the big difference over the original 520 models, this one had the high V F format so it actually had extra resolution on the thing compared to the original model. Now while it saved him to these floppy discs it, you really could not put these in anything else. It's not like you had a floppy, a two inch floppy disc reader in your computer and you could just shove it in and get the image from that.

It just like, as far as I'm aware, you could not plug these things into anything. Maybe there was some commercial reader out there or something like that, but you basically have to put it back in here and then get the video out and connect that up to your TV. And if maybe if you were advanced back in 1991, you might have some way to actually capture the power like a the actual power video and then upload that to your computer. if you're I don't know, did anyone actually do that? But the ironic thing is when you play back the image from this, it's actually putting it back into the Valve Power video format.

so it's actually outputting video. Its output in the still image. but as a continuous video image. So you've got to actually capture video.

You can't actually extract the data directly from this and feed it into a computer. doesn't work like that. and this one had a stunning 51 millimeter equivalent if 2.4 lens. There we go and I had a macro function as well.

Had a viewfinder. It's our analog viewfinder here. A little red tab pops up in there when you've got the macro mode on. It's kind of cute and there's the button to take your image.

and basically it had L means up, lock or off which is strange play and erase. So that's the playback mode. and then you got the record mode where you press the button and it records. it automatically advances to the next image.

This basically just does displays the image number and you can erase them and Dayton you can't do much else. It had a flash yeah, but it pretty crusty as a camera let alone the recording format. and I don't think this thing came with it, but it was optional. it was the battery charger because this thing I don't know how long the battery lasted in here, but you could take out the battery and then you can shove it in there and charge it.

Or fantastically, look, it came with this probe, shove it up the clutter there and you can actually get video out and this is what I used to get the video back out of this thing that's got S-video but yeah, you know. Anyway, for film adapter I'm not sure what's going on there and for an RF unit first those people still with RF modulated TVs hopefully you can see the serial number there for those playing along at home. 5080 Yeah, it's got a one at the front, but like yeah. I think this was like the 5,000th one produced.

so hmm maybe I don't know how they did this arrow numbers but anyway I think it's pretty early. yeah I don't think they sold a huge amount of these things. so hmm. looks like we're gonna back up battery in there and that's about all she wrote.

Anyway, let's crack it open. Yep, there's no coin cell battery and it had a tripod mount as well. Fantastic! Someone was thinking and let's take the front off of taking out a few screws I Think she's gonna come out. Tada, we're in like Flynn Be careful of the photo flash capacitor in there.

probably don't want to touch that I Got to make sure that's discharged. But yeah, they've got a separate board in there for that. That's our main video sensor of course and that must be some sort of focus sensor in there. So just work our meter on Lo.

Zed Mode there and there we go. Oh, it's only eight volts. She'll be right. Check it out! I Take off this side panel here and we've got a four pin test port there or something test.

yeah, probably production test alignment port maybe I don't know. I've got the floppy cover off, but unfortunately we're not going to be able to see the head move, you power the thing up and we can make a door. but that's not the head. the heads buried away elsewhere in there so you don't see anything move unfortunately.

and here we go: I think I've got all the screws out and we'll this lifts up Tada, we're in like Flynn Beauty Right away, we can see the density inside this thing. Look, they have really haven't wasted too much space. I mean the floppy drive takes up an absolute ton of space inside there. But yeah, they've done a really good fit to envelope design in there.

What they've done, it is a curved design like that. You can actually see how that multi board layer approach allows them to get the curve in there. Like that. Extensive use of flat flex as you'd expect and this is was released in 91 would have been designed in the late 80s.

Interestingly, you can see a cutout for a chip there that would be, well, that's what I believe it is. Anyway, yeah, I think I can see some pins coming off there. So yet they've done that. Cut that out so that they could get a lower profile on that chip so it doesn't take up as much height.

So there must have been. You know, I'm pretty desperate for some height at that particular point. so the mechanical designer came back to the PCB layout person and said hey, we need some extra hide in here but you know you're gonna have to chop out this party aboard and route everything around it and groan. Yeah, okay, I can do that here.

no worries, you know I can work magic. Then we got all our tactile dome buttons there. We've got a real tactile switch, therefore the main shutter button thank you very much. Now this tactile dome on Flex rubbish.

Notice the careful lug around in sold it look soldered directly down to there I'm not sure. oh that's that. I think that's is that the cage of the oh no, that's the negative of the battery Is it or the metal frame surrounding that. so really will shielded? They go into town also screwing down.

Probably got a ground connection on the flat flex ribbon there for the tactile domes as well and it goes down to this board and whatever you know, shield is under there for the battery. Well what not? So that's that's. pretty decent. Now you get this board out here.

We might have to unsolder something here. Where's that going off? -? not entirely sure, but yeah, this might not be easy to get back together and a viewfinder just popped out and there is that red shutter that I was telling you about. This goes off to the macro switch on the side and it just moves in a little bit of red film there into the yeah, partly into the shot just to show you that you're in macro mode because there's no you know, image data or any crap like that on there. It's just an optical viewfinder and underneath the viewfinder that went in here.

Wow Check out all the little trimmer pots in there. Someone's got to get in there and go with the tongue at the right angle. Someone with a gray beard that's hey Pal video for you. This is an analogue camera.

Remember that it is not digitally processing this image. This thing is basically just a camcorder that doesn't record video. It just recalls records still images on the disc in this case instead of tape. And by the way, if you wanted to know where the Sony prefix DSC or digital still camera came from there, it is still a camera.

but it's digital. It's dead analog. And let's see if we can get the sensor out here and this is about a two hundred and thirty thousand elements CCD Sensor I believe and that makes a little got a spring in there that makes sense cuz Pal is 720 by 576 but this has got 720 by about 320 I believe it, it will. They only specified in line so about 320 lines so it's not the pool the full up pal standard.

so yeah, we may have to get that board out. Anyway, this thing is really rather difficult to get apart. Hmm, wasn't designed for servicing, that's for sure. Probably connects a larger way connector over here I think I might be right? Yep, Ah, it's a bit brutal, but look at that.

We got it. There we go and there is our entire camera sensor module. Look at that. They would have assembled and tested that completely separately and whoa, Look at that little power package.

that's interesting. Wow I Haven't seen something like that in a long time. and to enable the testing of that, you can see the test pads on there they would have shoved this thing down into was some sort of test jig although you know I don't know why necessarily why cuz you've got the connector on there already. but maybe they were just.

yeah, they're all just going off to there. So anyway, that might have been there. just an easier way than actually having to plug in a physical connector. It might be just be quicker to put that on a bed of nails than it is to plug in that connector there.

And they've done the exact same thing over here as well and we've seen to it. At least have two motors in here. You can see the little enamel coated wire going off there, that's going off to some motor down in there and it looks like there's another one on the bottom there. So let's hook up our function Jen to that and see if we can get that to operate.

You can usually get these little motors to flip at a vote or two. so you usually like start out with a volt on your power supply and hook it up to the motor and you can get it to do stuff now. I Was able to get it with my power supply but I've hooked this up to my function. Jen I've got to set to 8 volts peak-to-peak before I actually got it to do this and I've got a 1 Hertz square wave.

There we go. That sweet see the iris moving open and if I increase the amplitude it should open all the way. And that's with an 8 volt sine wave. There we go.

It's a what's a 4 bladed iris? Is it okay? let's take that up to 10 volts peak-to-peak square wave. Yeah, it's opening more now and the other one off to the side here seems to be the shutter. Let me first of all, open the Iris. There we go.

And now let's do the other one. The shutter. Here we go. Boom.

And if we take this bracket off here that holds the backboard in place for the sensor, it should just be its own self-contained board and that will have the surface mount sensor on it. you can bet your bottom dollar there. It is. Aha beautiful.

Let me get the macro lens out. Now that's really interesting. It looks like it's got some clear encapsulants there and that is it. It's fascinating, no different to like camcorder tear downs we've seen previously that typically have a bare die.

this one seems to have is that like a glass lens on top of it a glass protective lens. So there you go. That's the 231,000 or there abouts picture elements thank you very much. Oh, and that cutout that we saw on the mainboard.

They've also got those. same here. This is actually a power package. and it's likely a power package on the other one.

- there it is. So I was a little bit off about gaining while doing it for height reasons. most likely not. It's because it's got big power tabs which get the heat out from the internally from the die there.

Now this camera is actually a fixed focus system, so there's no traditional focus motor with extra lens in there so there's not going to be a focus our sensor. So this puppy here, rather than being a traditional focused type sensor, is going to be some sort of sensor for the metering. So some sort of exposure sensor. Let's take it out and have a squiz.

There we go. Some little lah encapsulated photo sensor thingy and bonus points if you can find a data sheet for that puppy. So that's about all she wrote for that module. It's pretty simple, you know.

no fancy focusing lens arrangement, just a simple fixed focus camera straight on a sensor, iris shutter, and some metering. No worries. Oops, you've got to be careful taking out these connectors. That one's stuck in there.

pretty good. And yeah, did I damage some tracks? Mmm yeah. this thing's not designed to be easily serviced. We've got some fixed wires soldered over here, which you got to unsolder these wires going over to this board I soldered over to here.

There we go. but they do have a connector down here which hopefully wow we can pull out and get that board out. The good thing about this board? look I Got some board to board either KX there and there so it's densely packed and interconnected. It really is quite an effort.

Oh I got another bloody connector on the back here. Hang on there we go. and that one should just flip out. And if we have a look at the main processor board, here is some sort of motor roller processor II Thing I don't know that number doesn't bring up anything on first search and well I don't know another Mitsubishi job' down there.

Lotsa it's going to be. You know, a fair bit of custom stuff on here. bet your bottom dollar. And once again, there's that power package we saw.

So it wasn't a height thing to have the cutout on the back side of the board. It was merely that the power package just had to sit down flush into the board. Now we're getting more and more into this. We just lifted, flip this out of the case, undid a couple of screws on the side.

We're gonna have power supply stuff over there. We'll take a look at it. all. This sort of stuff here is all floppy drive controller stuff cuz the floppy mechanism sits directly all on top of that.

So that's all the mechanical transport and the head and everything else. and this would be the motor drive and the all the wreckless that you know, the head amplifier and all that sort of jazz as well. So this actually gives you a sense of how much of the camera itself is made up of just the storage mechanism. I Mean this is it.

all this, All this. stuff here with all of its all of the tremor adjustments, everything else. this int I am mechanism would take up more than half. probably.

you know, two-thirds of the size of this thing. and that's just to store your photos on this 2 inch floppy. And of course, this. you know in a modern, any sort of digital camera after like the Nate little late 90s.

you know, like six seven years after this would have been stored to a SD card. So that's just. you know, all that effort, the most of the design effort would have revolved around storing stuff on these video floppies. I mean it's just incredible.

You know, in terms of like the processing and stuff like that doesn't have to do bugger-all it's basically all the analog processing storing on the floppy, the physical disk transport mechanism, and all that sort of stuff, the ejection. and yeah, that's it. So you can see why these things just died in the ass. as did say the Sony Mavica one camera which I've done a teardown of which are saved into three and saved images.

The three and a half inch floppy drive the storage medium just changed everything once those SDS or compact flash cards came along. It just yeah, these things were just obsolete overnight, but you can imagine the design meeting for this in the late 80s. You know, like 1989? This came out in 91. So maybe 1990, for example, we're in the 1990s for goodness sake and the best they could.

Best idea they could come up with for a consumer camera was not a digital camera was to store it in old analog Pal format on a two inch floppy drive. I Mean it's just yeah, that's the best they could come up with, but hey, just nothing else really existed. We didn't have like flash memory and stuff like that back then really hadn't taken off. And that's the thing This was just like at the end of its life because even though our flash memory was developed in 1980 by Toshiba, it wasn't until 1988 that Intel came out with their first Nor flash memory chip.

So they would have known about this whether the nor flash memory when they started to do this. but either it wasn't the right cycles weren't there. it could have been a hundred or a thousand or something, or it was just too expensive or whatever, or they didn't have the digital processing technology to convert the image and store it digitally. If so, the first digital cameras, so you know, even though technically the flash type memory was there to store these things, you know, they still went ahead and used the video floppy and stored it analog wise.

And the first start NAND flash memory didn't come out until 1995. So a good five years after this thing was developed. and of course the SD card that you're familiar with these days didn't come out until 1999, and Compact flash was still four years out at 1994 or thereabout. So this thing just so happened to be designed at the tail end of the analog period.

and after that couple years later, everyone was thinking not, we're gonna do this digitally and we're in like Flynn on the floppy controller here and you can see the amount of effort that goes into this thing. I mean tons of shielding as well and you can see how they've earth.the the metal cans there and then they've got that going over to the to the main chassis of the floppy drive transport mechanism. Another one of those are power packages. they're I Rather like the look at those, they're pretty jazzy.

Anyway, that's all on our flat flex, so that's you know. Pretty advanced little tiny transport mechanism for your 2 inch floppy. That's pretty impressive technology for the day. Um, I'm not sure if I'll take that down further or not, but donuts.

Maybe we can see. We will flip a couple of cans off, but you can tell what's gonna be iron under there because look, we got our soles a shielded a coax they're going over or a shielded twisted-pair going over. so that's going to be coming from the head and that's going to be the head amplifier. You can see the tiny little wires going over there to the head down on the and that wall.

That and of course the head will move across the disc back and forth like that as the disc spins and I'd Love to put a disc and show you it working but unfortunately you've got to actually connect the thing all back up and then it's hidden. So yeah, that's not gonna work, but we can certainly pop this puppy open. Here's a little catch here. twing if we stick the disc in there, there we go.

maybe you can see it I don't know, it's not going to be terrific and then close it up and now the head will be sitting on the exposed floppy surface down in there. There you go you can see the reflection and as I put the floppy and you should be able to see that retract due to some hooks on the side. There tada it opens up and exposes the disc to the head. And the interesting thing about this, you can tell it's an all analog system because this is here's the head coming over head amplifier and all this analog of video power processing.

Here here's our video output connector which goes on the side of the board. There it is just directly connected to all this all this processor rubbish. It's got nothing to do with it that just drives the LCD and you know interfaces to the buttons and does a few things like that really. But yep, it's basically an entire analog camera and if you flip this big metal shield off, we can start to see all the analog video processing here.

the there's a Toshiba Ta 8740 1f Probably good luck getting data on that I Don't know, but look and all the trimmers look at them all as if there wasn't enough on the other side already. Counter: I Don't know I've lost count already. Oh wow, look at him. Wow Somebody had to tweak all these bastards.

Unbelievable. Look at them all. Look, this is ridiculous. That's insanity.

Yeah. I've got to count them now. I Counted 40 40 trimpots on this bastard. and are there any on the other side now? I Think they're all on that side.

40 trimmers. Somebody had to trim all those things. Unbelievable. Now we've taken most of the cans off here and if you remember back right at the start, we had those exposed for pin outside the case accessible if you just took the outside case off.

Now that's coming from this puppy here. haven't looked up that yet. But look where it is on the other side Today that is our head amplifier taken the metal can off. so that is obviously our head amplifier.

So those pins that we saw on the outside that were accessible they were obviously for to allow maybe even servicing, realignment of the head, checking the alignment of the head when the thing is fully assembled, so that's rather clever. What else are we got? We got a Hitachi hae double one, eight eight Two will have a squiz for the datasheet for that one, see if we can find anything and there is a yes. We finally found a Canon branded chip. Check that out! So that's obviously some sort of custom puppy.

We've got ourselves a clock up there, so that'd be some sort of art, you know? CK for some sort of clock Gen that was under a metal shield as well. little trimmer adjustment there to work, just tweak the frequency of that crystal and not much else. Interesting. And it looks like we've got some sort of filter there that could be some sort of, you know bandpass E-type job.

and on the bottom side here 18yo a part that was under a metal can as well. It's got its own crystal and a couple more more filtery staff. Look at this. adjustable a slug, tuned inductors, and yeah, all that for the power video standard.

Tons of stuff required. All that when you could have just stored it digitally. Hmm, but not at the time, only later. and I think this video has gone on long enough so I won't crack open the power supply and things like that.

Going to have a switching converter inside that can. Nothing fancy. There's the photo flash capacitor and that's on its own separate board going over to the flash over here. Dangerous.

No touchy unless you've discharged the thing, so that's not nothing doing there really. so that's pretty much it. I Hope you enjoyed that tear down of the Cannon ion still video analog camera the RC 260. Um, it would be quite similar in the RC 250 which came out in 1988.

so you can see this is basically late eighties technology. although this did come out in 91. it was on the tail end of the switch from analog recording which was not popular at all. I Mean these video floppies? they never really took off.

I Mean this is zero number 5000 How many did they make? They probably would have sold a huge number of these things. although you know I could be wrong because it was the only thing available at the time. But as you've seen, the quality is awful to store just power frames. I mean it's just.

ah, it's horrible. I mean you get just the same thing or even better actually, if you filmed it with a camcorder and then just press pause on the camcorder and just recorded video and press pause. but hey, you know I Yeah, not that terrific. And of course it was completely killed.

obsolete practically overnight once our digital storage technology and digital processing and once the late 90s came high, it was all over. Red Rover The complete switch to our digital cameras which compact flash cards and and digital processing. and then JPEG and everything else. So yeah, but fascinating look at an obsolete technology.

So if you actually have one of these things and you actually found it useful at the time, then and how you actually used it. or if you've got some old photos from one of these things, please let photos and effectively still video see if you can capture it and please let us know and upload them. It'll be absolutely fascinating. But yep, this thing still worked after all these years.

Not surprising. You know, I would have given a fairly good chance to work, but yeah, it's just as far as actually taking photos. It's crusty as but we needed this step in the technology to eventually get to digital. You could argue, you know, and it is some brilliant engineering here here.

Lots of fit to ample design and tons of engineering that went into this. So anyway, if you like that, please give it a big thumbs up. As always, there's some high res tear down photos over on Eevblog comm if you want to take a closer look and I hope you enjoyed it. Catch you next time! Hi! welcome to Teardown! Tuesday You know I Love vintage stuff here on the EEV blog.

So I got another vintage teardown. Bit of consumer history here: This is Sony's first really useable 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.