Camera Repair Course (2019)
At a previous job, we had informal &quot;teardown Tuesdays&quot; where someone would bring in a device, and we&#x27;d take it apart over lunch to see how it worked. Sometimes it was a rare&#x2F;expensive&#x2F;new device and we had to promise to at least <i>attempt</i> to get it back together afterward, but this was the exception. Everybody should try this... It&#x27;s incredibly fun and informative.<p>Two particularly good ones that I remember were the VCR and the SLR camera. I brought in the camera -- I think I paid ~$25 for it on eBay, and I still have the shutter mechanism somewhere. Makes for a good fidget toy.<p>This exercise really made me appreciate just how far you can get with good design and clever engineering. Even though I knew roughly how the camera worked and what its advantages were, we inevitably came across some assemblies that we couldn&#x27;t immediately identify. Eventually someone would work out that it was part of the metering or autofocus system, and everyone had fun shining light through it to try and gain an intuitive understanding of how it worked.<p>And you can absolutely do this! Most of those assemblies were clever because they were so devilishly simple. The autofocus, for example, redirects a small patch of light from a particular location onto a separate mirror or prism that can be placed out of the way. Some optics expand the light onto a 1D CCD or a pair of detectors, and then some rudimentary circuitry can be used to drive the lens motors and close the feedback loop.<p>The modern techniques might be conceptually similar, but it&#x27;s so cool to see the problem solved without a massive sensor and a DSP that&#x27;s arguably a supercomputer -- Just some discrete components.<p>It feels very: (1) I can&#x27;t believe this actually works, (2) I can&#x27;t believe they managed to assemble this tiny thing in a cost-effective way, and (3) you&#x27;re trying to tell me this Rube-Goldberg machine was relatively <i>reliable</i> too!? I know our modern monolithic slabs of glass and aluminum and potted silicon and millions of lines of code can probably beat these old devices on almost any quality metric that anyone actually cares about, but there&#x27;s something charming and magical about the way we used to make things.