On Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 12:40:32PM +0000, mike wilson scripsit: > The ribbon cable part of the integrated electronic might be slightly > problematic but, really, if you gave the average person a gear wheel > or a piece of electronic whizzery and asked them to make you a couple > of hundred of each themself would their reaction be any different? > Both require people with specialist skills and equipment. By far the > hardest part of the electronics to reproduce is the code. Everything > else is rattled off production lines in factories by the bucketfull.
This year's ICs are, yes; those from five years ago, not so much, those from 10 years ago, hardly at all. What digital really means is that all the complexity that used to live in the chemical plant that made the film has moved into the camera. Any give camera represents a very specific slice through the state of the technology; a custom image engine chip on a custom PCB (printed circuit board) with a funny shape, done to whatever process would do the job and was cheapest at the time. There isn't any way anybody is going to replicate that on a hobby basis. (Military procurement sometimes gets stuck trying to do that, and it functions even more like lighting bushels of money on fire than military procurement usually does.) So I really doubt there's going to be a small-shop digital camera rebuild business going; if the tech gets good enough that this is physical possible at all (put copper wire, sand, and random bits of junk in the fabber, get ICs out, tech) the small shop guys will be custom-making cameras for the retro crowd who hate the idea of having recorders on their optic nerves. -- Graydon -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
