Taking Apart Toy Video Cameras

Toy cameras. They're fun to give to kids so they can take pictures without ruining your camera. They're low quality and cheap. But what's powering them? Anything cool? Anything useful? Many of them at least have an LCD screen, but what other treasures are they hiding?

Meet the victims. One of them is a Tiger camera, the other is a Disney High School Musical themed camera. Don't judge - I won it at a Trivia night. I decided to take these apart because one of them didn't work and, more importantly, my phone can take better pictures on lower resolutions than these could ever hope to get. So they're useless to me while they're still assembled.

I decided to attack the orange Tiger camera first because that one had visible screws. The first step was to take off all of the screws I could find. There were four immediately visible. Then I pulled it half apart. I slid a tool in the space and undid the flex connectors that were holding it together. After that, it pulled apart with a little bit of force. There were three flex connectors. Two for the screen and one for the button panel.

Next, I undid all of the other screws I could find. They were all over the place, you just have to look around on the board. To get to the very last one, I had to desolder the battery pack from the board to get to the last screw to take the orange front off of it. Then, I took the screen out and found two screws holding the thing together. Taking the screen out was a challenge in and of itself. But I got it out and discarded the plastic. After that, here's what I had left:

The chip that runs it all is the SPCA533A which has been designed specifically for the purpose of small cameras. It's also sporting Hynix 256Mb flash memory. There are a few other chips on the board that look to be significant (one of them is probably RAM and the other is probably a USB interface), but I honestly can't tell because the numbers on the chip pulled off with the sticker on it.

The LCD is weird as well. I imagine it's some kind of standard connector, as that would be the easiest thing for the SCPA533A to support, but I can't find much about it. If I can, I'll definitely use it and see what I can make it do. I imagine the resolution is 320x240 with a color depth of 16-bits or so. I'll do some research on it and maybe use it in a future project!

Short of destroying the plastic, I wasn't able to figure out how to take apart the Disney camera. I'll probably take a dremel tool to it later, but for now it'll stay the way it is. You win this time, Hannah Montana!