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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ก.ย. 2024
- Inside the worlds first Digital SLR camera with rear LCD and inbuilt JPEG processing, the 1998 vintage Kodak DCS315, based on the Nikon Pronea 6i film SLR camera body.
This was before Canon and Nikon had released their own DSLR camera technology, when Kodak ruled the digital camera world!
History of Kodak DSLRs: www.nikonweb.co...
Users Manual: ftp://ftp.kodak.com/web/service/manuals/dcs/6b0935.pdf
Datasheets:
doc.chipfind.ru...
doc.chipfind.ru...
vader.ece.ucsb....
datasheets.maxi...
www.ti.com.cn/c...
pdf.datasheetca...
www.analog.com/...
pdf.datasheetca...
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At work in the late 90's we had a Sony Mavica digital camera with floppy drive storage (one to share with the whole company!). I used it to takes photos for production documentation. People were stunned that you could insert camera images into Microsoft Word, along with software screen captures. I was treated as the documentation god!
Great tear-down! the slow painful demise of Kodak is a pretty sad story though :(
Nikon, Canon and Kodak in a single camera?
Jeepers; I own a working DC315 today.
Crop factor MASSIVE! :-) i. e. about 2.6X !!
Thus a 50mm F1.8 Normal lens on a DCS315 has the angle of view like a 130mm lens on a Full frame camera . It does use Nikon autofocus lenses and thus has the contacts in the body to talk to the lens. For a manual lens there is NO direct manual metering; not even stop down metering. But one can snap a shot and use the histogram on the LCD to check exposure. The manual says to use a hand held meter.
Finally something for people who complain about viewfinder coverage being only 99% or so. Here you get more then 200 %! :D
its amazing how much you learn just by watching someone with the knowledge take things apart, I would like to say that im studying electrical engineering going into my 3rd year. So seeing this stuff is just awesome! thanks for doing what you do dave!
That this was an actual film SLR with a digital sensor body basically stuck on just blows me away. The advancement it this kind of tech is simply unbelievable. This is probably around the time when I got to have my first exposure to a DVD player, we had a CRT TV/VHS player in our car for long trips, and before I got my own personal floppy disk.
I feel old now!
Some things all/most comments missed so far:
1. APS film cameras were made under a special Kodak license for the way they could make different size pictures on the same roll of film and still get cut up correctly when developed at Kodak's automated labs/stores. This probably gave Kodak access to the design data they needed to retrofit APS SLRs as digital SLRs.
2. Back in those days, high end SLR cameras came with interchangeable backs for different uses, like regular, big roll, long 8 fps shots etc. This made fitting a digital back a natural step, and for some years, high end models actually offered a choice of film and digital interchangeable backs.
3. The eyepiece on SLRs is cross vendor replaceable. This is so you can replace them with models that correct the same as your personal glasses, as well as special angled or periscope ones for special occasions. So I guess the previous owner left a random Canon eyepiece on it when he sent it in.
4. Older (pre-SATA) laptop harddrives could sometimes be plugged into double PCMCIA slots, this was part of the connector design. Conversely, PCMCIA/MMC flash drives could be used directly as SSDs with old school parallel ATA/IDE controllers.
Regarding the dead space at 35:32, I believe that is a design carry-over from the previous models of the Kodak DCS series. I have a DCS-420 (an older camera than this model) which has a similar form-Nikon film cam on top, Kodak imager on bottom. With those cameras the batteries were not side loaded like in this video. The rechargeable batteries were below the bottom plate of the camera tucked away in that handle area and were not meant to be taken out by the consumer.
This is the most fascinating tear-down yet!
Thank you for sharing this video with us! I have been curious to see the early days of the DSLR.
Nice video Dave..
Worked with one of these Kodac, marine application. Getting that bad boy in a pressure housing (inc batteries) down 3000m took some work!
-Mark
Very interesting and informative. I saw this camera in the shops those days and thought l would never have a digital camera.. :)
As I bought a Kodak 290D compact with only 2.1 MP for about 750 pounds from the airport tax free and a CF card 64 MB for 175 pounds
What a huge difference now !!!
I have an old Nikon D70, which at this point is about 12 years old. It still holds up today but I would love a bit more resolution and video capabilities, but just having the F-mount and all the different lenses available makes up for it.
It is was (and still is in some circles) popular for video cameras.
Nikon on top, Kodak on bottom & Canon on viewfinder....
I just bought a Kodak DCS Pro SLR/c for 100$ at a photo studio who closed down his business, with a bunch of compact flash cards and stuff. Awesome to see what's in these cameras
Kodak's last attempt at a DSLR, a market that they once owned.
So sad they could have been tops if they were not so stuck on film they really blew it so sad@@scottlarson1548
No problem, I do little bits when I can. I like adding photos, because a picture does tell a thousand words.
If you look carefully above the digital image sensor there is a glass with a slight red tint. It is actually an infrared filter. First Kodak DCS professional cameras of early 90's with the collaboration of Canon, Nikon didn't have infrared filter above the sensor and the photos had problems with the excessive sun's infrared radiation. Human faces under direct sunlight were a little red. A similar problem had the first digital rangefinder Leica M mount camera. A filter on the lens and some digital processing could solve a the problem. Nowadays all sensors have low pass filter which offer antialiasing infrared and UV block.
Digital image sensors are very sensitive to the invisible ultraviolet and infrared light. That problem is obvious in digital photos. Low pass filter solves the problem but reduces the optical quality. That's the reason why early digital image sensors didn't have low pass filter. Lately many cameras avoid the antialiasing feature of the low pass filter for better optical quality. When you try to clean the sensor of your SLR or mirrorless camera and accidentally scratch it, you actually scratch the low pass filter. The low pass filter isn't expensive but its replacement is difficult and expensive.
In 1997 I wanted to buy the Sony Mavica FD5 with the floppy disk. Its resolution is 640 X 480 but the native resolution is 320 X 240. For static objects the camera takes two shots instantly and with digital processing doubles the resolution.
In 1997 the USB and memory cards were unknown to most PC users. Floppy disk still reigned. I didn't know many things about dSLR cameras, the importance of lenses or the digital scanning of films.
My 15" monitor was set to 800 X 600 resolution which was very common then. So a 320 X 240 wasn't small at all and especially for Internet when nearly all pages were designed for the 800 X 600 resolution.
The Price of Kodak DCS 315 in 1998 was too high even for rich enthusiasts amateurs. I could afford the Sony Mavica FD5 in 1997. It was quite expensive and I knew that soon it would be replaced by something much better. Nowadays I regret that I didn't bought it. At that time I could shoot even with low quality thousands important photos of my life and the city I live with no extra cost. One of the mistakes of my life. Instead I invested on an expensive full featured computer which after three years had very little value.
After 2010 the digital photography has matured. Smartphones take decent photos and even cheap mirrorless cameras shoot good photos.
Nowadays I still use my Sony NEX-3 14.2 MP mirrorless camera of 2010 and the photos I shot are really good.
Darn where did you learn all this? And most importantly if you know all this why are you commenting on a really old video? Go and do something with this knowledge haha
And a couple of years later Canon came out with their DiGIC system which has a dedicated DSP for image compression- it compressed images on the fly as fast as they could be transferred off the sensor.
The lower LCD contains the controls for the Nikon SLR camera body. They've basically translated all of the controls from the main camera body into the lower half.
Well its November 2, 2014 and my Full Frame 14 MP Kodak SLR/n is still functioning. I am happy with my Kodak SLR/n.
I often think how "new" it must have been when trains, cars or planes came along and always feel like we don't have inventions like this these days anymore. But then when I look at stuff from ten or twenty years ago, how much changed since then and what is all possible, I realize it's all just happening on another level.
My son was hospitalized for several month in 1993, and the LA Times reporters that visited had the same Kodak setup, although my memory said the donor camera body was a Canon.
Yes, it's mainly system-on-chip (SOC) integration.
I really enjoyed this teardown, definitely one of my favourites. ! I'm recommending this to my Dad who was a semi-pro photographer for some years, he'll love this !
Nothing gives me more satisfaction than to dissect obsolete high priced electronic equipment.
That one is solid as a rock !
Oh yeah, that's pretty slick. Thanks for taking advantage of this opportunity to give back to the Wikipedia community!
I don't normally want to do that because it's an extra production step that is not easy in Sony MovieStudio.
This is not the first DSLR from Kodak. There were several DCS cameras before this one. The DCS 100 was based on a Nikon F3 in 1991. Nikon had brought the E2 out 3 years before the DCS 315 and that was even full frame (kinda). Although it wasn't quite "digital" Nikon also had the QV-1000c in 1986. Good luck finding any of those though. Although the E2 is fairly easy to find the working batteries are not. The first proper DSLR (designed from the ground up) was the Nikon D1, in 1999. The Nikon E2 doesn't quite count there as it was still based around a Nikon F4, even if it doesn't really look like it.
Great observation. As a new military photographer in 1991, the first digital cameras they let us use were the Apple Quick take and the Sony Mavica…Apples camera worked pretty well…they could never get the mavica to work quite right.
Cool to shoot what is now not even a thumbnail, lol.
It would be really cool to get this fully working :)
This video makes me cry in a good way.
On a side note you didn't insert CF but microdrives waiting to fail.
And please dont do you never do this to a Fuji S3.
Yes, a few editing issues, plus it's 5 hours long!
And that advancement from his hybrid hack to pretty much what we know today only took 1-2 years!
In pro audio, Firewire is still popular. Part of the reason is many of us have already saturated USB controllers and need another interface type. My MOTU 828mk3 supports both firewire and USB.
Yes I agree this would make an interesting Fundamental Friday video!! To quickly review various sensor technologies (CMOS, CCD...) and how each works! Not that complicated to explain and it would clear many from the never ending marketing BS.... I'm sure Dave would enjoy such a crusade!!
2021 feb, remember back in about 1996 at a trade show they had a Film SLR camera with a big adapter on back with a big fat cable going to a bank of old computers,
Its still beloved in audio tech
For all you photography geeks out there like myself.
Kodak DSC315 CCD 3:4 aspect ratio sensor 1520x1008 max resolution.
Image capacity: Compact Flash memory cards (128 mb), Type II Flash memory cards (320 mb), IBM Microdrives (340 mb), and or Type III removable hard drives (520 mb).
Sutter speed 1/8800 to 30 seconds (1/2 stop increments)
ISO ranges of 100, 200, or 400.
love your shows and your enthusiasm, keep it up.
Kodak also made a Canon-based digital SLR around the same time (the model number of which escapes me, been too long since I used it). These were marketed at newspaper photographers and were fairly low resolution, something like 1.2MP. But newspaper print is pretty low resolution anyway, and even at $5k for the camera, that's still a big time and cost savings vs. developing and scanning film.
Great video Dave, I would also be keen to see the comparisons of the two. A good friend of mine was working on this technology in the mid 90's, amazing to see how far it has come!
How on earth does Dave know so much?! awestruck
JG Notes behind the camera...
+JG Yeah ! Sometime he says bullshit also !
He went to school :)
PCMCIA cards are still used to link into Siemens Simatic PLC's via the Profibus. There are USB adapters, but they still make the classic cards.
Such an interesting hybrid! Thanks for sharing!
Well you always have a pretty good idea of the date, and all the chips in the device should have about the same year on it.
I think it's the light. Watch the side of the power device, it changes brightness in rythm with the solder "pulsating". I think Dave was waving between the light source and the component ;)
Yeah Dave, I recognize the circular flex PCB "sandwich" contacts. I bought a superb condition Nikon F5 (pro film SLR) out of eBay, which had a dead viewfinder LCD. I managed to source the flex PCB part and could change it with the help of the appropriate service manual. And yes the F5 has the same weird system to join all flex PCBs inside the viewfinder... These contacts seem rather tough and proven despite their strange appearance...
My dad used to have a Sony Mavica digital camera in 1998 which used a 3.5" floppy disc! It did have live view though. Resolution was a whopping 640x480.
In the US, the FCC mandated IEEE 1394 ports on set-top boxes. You could feed these into D-VHS VCRs to record HDTV from your cable box.
Apparently the FireWire SDK for Macs had a sample application where it could emulate D-VHS VCRs, and apparently this is how early HDTV rips were done.
Shooting as a JPEG causes the DCS 315 camera to take 25 to 30 seconds bog to process each image. Shooting a TIFF one can shoot bursts of 2 frames per second
Unlike USB, Firewire provides synchronous bus transfers and end-to-end device nodes something which is necessary when you need guaranteed transfer rates and latencies. Thus, Firewire was and is actually been used in professional equipment like video editing and laboratory measuring equipment like scanning tunneling microscopes.
Those square pads are production test points. The manufacturer would have a "bed-of-nails" that contacts all those pads to do testing and such without needing to plug in a connector.
It's from those iPhone repair kits you get on ebay. The other end is a big flat screwdriver.
I saw really old digital camera but bad picture was in 1996 when I was in school.
You got it wrong dude, there were quite a number of DSLR cameras preceding the somewhat inferior DCS315. The DCS100, DCS200, DCS420, DCS460, DECS520, DCS560, DCS720, DCS760. The DCS315 was only marginally better than the DCS100 and DCS200 and much inferior to the rest. I know, because I own ALL of them and a few more as well!!
Gordon Scott he said that the one he is showing is the first that would not be out of place in the modern market.
The title does say 'world's first DSLR'. I knew right away it was not because the early ones did not have LCD screens. www.nikonweb.com/dcs420/
Yes its quite amazing!
Pretty cool, I kind of want one for my collection now. People really seem to take this technology (really technology in general) for granted, but really, it's fucking amazing.
What a beast!
No doubt the engineer who designed those flat-flex connectors was very proud!
fuji s1 has the whole nikon f65 camera with all the film motors and stuff, the only thing they changed is they flashed the chip that does the DX code in oreder to communicate with digital back, shutter times, sleep mode, etc, still trying to analyse how it works
TOTALLY INCORRECT .... The first portable digital SLR camera, introduced by Minolta in 1995....
www.nikonweb.com/dcs100/ Kodak 1991
In like flyn, love it. Great job Dave
Wow! Your videos are so interesting! I've learned a lot from you over the past few days!
Another interesting for teardown will by fujifilm S3. This also digital camera in analog body.
Hi Dave this is probably one of your most interesting tear down ever from a design point of view. A major company hacking, modding and bodging so they can be first to the market.
It is still widely common to use firewire for professional audio interfaces. So yes, there are a lot of people using it :-)
Yeah, I bought a whole set of Wiha precision drivers. Very nice.
I read that the image sensor uses indium-tin oxide gates, a technolgy you still see in CCDs today because of their very high quantum efficiency. I would imagine that they used frame-interline transfer so that they could have a minimum of pins on the CCD for power and image transfer.
The AE-L button is to lock metering on the current scene, not for auto exposure.
I see alot of gold on the CCD sensor and even a few thick bonding wires made of gold. Some bonding wires are so small that the slightest touch could break them and I have seen such small bonding wires in an old Pentium that was no longer working and so we looked inside it. Those bonding wires are so tiny that you need a good magnifying glass to see the individual wires.
Every audio interface I have ever owned has been Firewire, Including my current one. Fantastic for low latency audio. Shame the port is slowly disappearing, it's just so reliable and great for professional gear.
Jesus, that thing is massive.
It's also still commonly used with studio audio interfaces due to the low latency constant bitstreams
I used it for external hard drives and networking for a while.
Hey hey Rochester people...Any fellow RIT folks on here? I bet half of my professors took part in the design of this camera. Fantastic
Yeah, it's not a real SLR. The "optical viewfinder" is just a tiny LCD screen that displays what the image sensor sees (just like the back viewfinder).
Sorry if I came off rude, wasn't my intention. I just see a lot of people throw "SLR" around as a general term for camera these days and it bugs me. A true SLR has a mirror that reflects the light coming through the lens into the viewfinder; it pops up out of the way when you hit the shutter to expose the film (or CCD).
hello from cowafornia! it is still tuesday here, don't feel too terrible!
Nikon has really just started to get full frame size last few years
"...it does recommend Alkaline batteries..." "...may degrade camera performance..." Great recovery from the teleprompter! 5-star!
This come out the year I was born, this video is 8yrs old, jump forward to 2021 im out doing wildlife photography and see people with their 3 year old dslr's and they seem ancient, they have to keep taking test shots to see their exposure and the loud mirror flipping scaring off wildlife. Im just out there complaining about my mirrorless 61 megapixels, 10fps with constant autofocus!
If you go for a nikon 1 get one of the V models, if you are going to get a cheap camera (such as the nikon 1 J* or S*) get a better cheaper one. I have a Nikon 1 V1 which i use for serious photos and an Olympus PEN mini PM1 which i have ripped the IR sensor out of and use for situations where i don't want to bring the more expensive camera. The V1 cost me about 400 euro and the PM1 about 170 euro. As an added bonus the PM1 comes with a standard flash shoe.
I can't imagine using this with any sort of heavy lens unless your tripod is pretty darn strong!
I wonder if Kodak didn't use that same sensor board in their Canon hybrid as well, and perhaps that's why the sensor board has dual sensor mounts if the Canon sensor size were slightly different?
Very cool for pro photogs to be able to get basically the same digital camera but with a Nikon or Canon lens mount to fit the vast collection of expensive lenses they've already invested in.
I still use Firewire because I have mini DV video cameras that I use on a regular basis.
I'm well shocked. 1999? That's just crazy. Keeping up with technology is getting increasingly difficult. :O
I have a Kodak Professional DCS-520 that has a burnt LCD screen on the top section of the camera body. The back section LCD screens look great. Do you have any disassembly/assembly instructions or diagrams? I have two EOS-N1 bodies coming and I would like to replace 520 body out if possible or just the top section. Any information would be most appreciated.
that part makes the image in the viewfinder smaller (it is called an eyepiece extender). It is an accessory which you can still buy for modern DSLRs. I don´t think that it was shipped with it, because... well... try an EX15 your shelve: No magic happening.
i have some tools like that. they came in an electronics tool set. they feel like ceramic or maybe really hard brittle plastic, which would be electrically non-conductive
The way Dave says 'Hi!'; at the start of every vid sounds so sarcastic. Like how dare you come watch this video. : )
the Pronea was Nikon's APS SLR and and thesensor of the time was APS 'sized'...the Pronea lenses would has perfect coverage for the sensor and the 35mm lenses would actually 'over' cover the sensor thus changing the WYSIWYG in the viewfinder.....Five Thousand new, and not easy to get at that for the average Joe.....
theres one for 1,000 on ebay. wow they really hold value. now i want one!
He or she really went to town!
I used to have a kodak DC40. 1/3 of a megapixel, could store 48 pictures. Connected via a serial port.
oh look! You did do other camera videos!
Today the camera still makes an 1.3 megapixel TIFF file, but the camera does have some Infrared Response thus a "hot mirror filter" helps.
my first Kodak camera was a easyshare dx6440 4.0mp its about10 years old or more
In XP "windows explorer" the TIFF's thumbs DO show up as tiny 104x156 thumbs, In CS2 Browse i.e. Bridge too all are tiny 104x156 thumbs unless the Kodak driver is installed
Since today's cameras also use SMD components like this camera did, what makes current cameras (and electronics in general) smaller? Do ICs just integrate more functions that would take multiple ICs back in the 90's? More PCB layers these days? Advances in how the board was designed where they decided certain things were not necessary? Etc. A side by side comparison of a 90's model with a current one to show how electronics have shrunk (SMD era) would be great. Thanks.
the best ccd sensor for photo was made for Kodak like Leica put in your digital models.