innards of a crushed Sony Alpha dSLR
March 17, 2010 If you’ve got a strong stomach, you might want to take a look at the A200 photo essay on the English Russia website.
The photos examine a very mangled Sony Alpha A200 dSLR. I don’t know what happened to this camera, but it’s demise was very violent. It wasn’t just dropped or knocked off an end table.
Since the site doesn’t explain how the camera got in this state, I let my imagination fill in the blanks. It might have been tossed off the observation deck of a very tall building, or someone may have left it on the roof of their car and it flew off at 70mph. It might have been run over by a truck. My favorite theory is that a paparazzi tired to surprise Chuck Norris and Norris deftly dismantled his camera with his feet.
Whatever happened to the poor A200, its days as a fine photographic instrument are over. The only thing this wreck of a camera could capture is dust.
But that isn’t to say the dSLR is completely useless. It will never record an image to a memory card again, but it can serve as a learning tool. The people at the English Russia site grabbed a screwdriver and a working camera and proceeded with a thorough autopsy of the dead dSLR.
If you love fine cameras, the photos are disturbing, but fascinating. These photos may be a little too graphic for A200 owners. Consider this a warning. If you have nightmares after visiting the site, don’t blame me.
Not a dSLR repair manual
This is not a disassembly manual. These photos won’t teach you how to repair your Sony Alpha A200.
Instead, these images are reminiscent of a high-school biology class, where the students dissect a frog to see what is inside. The students don’t intend to put the frog back together afterward, so they simply cut away muscle and sinew to get to the more interesting bits underneath.
That’s exactly what happened with the A200. They dismembered the camera to see what was inside, knowing they couldn’t hurt anything. The camera was dead, repairing it wasn’t an option. So they delved deep into the innards and recorded what they found.
I’ve seen pristine cut-away cameras from Sony and other manufacturers. Those photos don’t have the impact the photos (apparently taken by Jollypix.com) have. Looking at the guts of the camera, you gain a deeper appreciation of the complexity inside an ordinary dSLR. Don’t forget that the A200 has fewer features than Sony’s high-end dSLRs. What would the innards of an Alpha A900 or A850 look like?
My original Minolta SRT was a fully mechanical camera. The only electronic hardware was in the meter. Each subsequent SLR I bought added additional circuitry, becoming more and more electronic inside.
Examining these amazing photos shows just how far cameras have advanced from the old mechanical cameras of the past. It also makes me wonder how the inside of my dSLR can be so packed with circuits and ribbon cable, yet be so reliable. It seems like there are all manner of things that could go wrong. Yet my cameras continue to function well and record outstanding images under very demanding conditions.
These images should make all of us appreciate our cameras and how special they are. They are also a reminder to the paparazzi in us all to keep our dSLRs away from Chuck Norris!
See the Sony dSLR dissection at the English Russia website.
Additional photo at Jollypix.com
It’s not photography, but tinkering with cameras is a fascinating hobby in itself. The need to mass produce makes it necessary to advance the technology in waves, where complexity of construction and miniaturization take turns. The SRTs were immensely complex mechanically–like three separate watch movements and a slew of levers, gears, pulleys (and silk cord!)–the iris lever and mirror returning to position automatically–and the aperture/timing adjustable and coupled to the meter. By the time the XG came out in the mid-70s, about half of the mechanics around the mirror box were replaced by much more simple electronics.
The X-700’s svelte build was possible because of miniaturization of electronics, and as a result it’s easy to work on–and quite roomy inside compared to the SRT. Then the Alpha 7000 arrived (or perhaps I should say: landed from Outer Space), with its internal winder and momentary-contact switch controls, and suddenly the SLR was thicker and again complicated in almost every cubic centimeter of its interior. Then technology advanced; Minolta added motorized iris operation (in apology for the whacky lever on the 9000, I like to think), larger LCD displays, and electronically-released pop-up flashes.
By the time the 700si came out, a wave of miniaturization cleaned up things under the hood, with less hard wiring and more stacked flex PC connectors. (And also by off-loading functionality to those infernal add-on cards, like the ones that are required to do certain repairs, but were accidentally shipped to Atlantis, never to be seen again.) Within a couple of years, the “letter” xi models shrunk and things took a turn toward the complicated. I was astounded by how jam-packed the seemingly simple QTsi was when I opened it up–this with a discrete shutter assembly, sophisticated ICs and a battery chamber with stacked 3 volt cells that occupy about the same space as one double-A.
I pulled apart a Maxxum 70 this past weekend, and was surprised to find how much miniaturization had accomplished in less than a decade. So little was under the top (because of the scale of electronics integration), that I could actually see the prism.
A set of problems had to be overcome to bring the digital SLR to the general consumer market, and you have to admire how engineers did it. There were early attempts, like the RD-175, but the Alpha 7D and the subsequent Sony models were much more compact. I’ve seen exploded diagrams of the Sony’s mirror box and shutter assembly, and it’s a piece of work. Think about this: the film winder motor provided locomotion to everything but the AF motor and the pop-up solenoid; suddenly it was gone, and engineers had to find a way to move the iris lever, the shutter and the mirror in a *much* smaller space.
That Alpha took a hit on the right side of the flash for sure. A lot of the body panels came off because it apparently has a mirror prism that collapsed, as opposed to a traditional glass block one. Interestingly, it acted like a crumple zone. I doubt the camera is as wrecked as it appears. The chassis looks good, the mount looks square with the sensor, and the main PCB appears to be intact. I bet it would be salvageable with a few body panels, an LCD, the stop controls and the prism and various parts surrounding. The multi-part chassis seems to be pretty tough.
Geez, how could this guy resist the urge to hook it up to a power supply to see what is does? :o)
That should be “letter si”, not “letter xi” (e.g. STsi, HTsi), in the third paragraph.
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Regards
Donna-Michelle
Sorry guys, links were broken, but not anymore! Enjoy =)