Graydon wrote:
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.
We are not so much talking about digital versus film as purely
mechanical cameras versus electro-mechanical ones.
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.
Leaving fantasy aside... I'm not sure I agree with you. The rebuild
business will undoubtedly be small scale. It's the production of spare
parts that will have to be significantly larger, both to provide for a
market of numerous small scale workshops and to meet the demands of a
producer requiring significant production runs. On the purely physical
side of the electronic spare part, the only part that is likely specific
to that particular part is the shape of the ribbon cable bit. All the
rest will be standard electronic parts. If you have a pattern, or the
file needed for setup of the machine, it would be very easy to set up
for a run of parts. Ask the people who are doing this for a living,
commonly known as pirates these days. Possibly the hardest bit will be
reverse engineering the code to go in the chips. All of this assuming
that there is a viable market and the intellectual copyright holder is
in agreement or it has lapsed.
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