ever wonder what's in a camcorder?

.

 

do you think they voided the warranty?

 

.

 

I hadn't ever thought of it...alot of the same pieces are used in VCRs,which makes sense.

 

Except that the parts in a regular VCR are a lot bigger, less expensive, and easier to work on.

Camcorders were one of the first consumer products to convert to surface mounted components, flexible PC boards, and other technologies that required a major upgrade of equipment for repair shops. And nowadays, they are getting so cheap that anything but the most minor repairs are going to cost nearly as much as buying a new camcorder.

Ah, the joys of the "throw-away" society.....

 

lots of stuff in there!

 

That's so true. I try to repair things myself,that's how I know what the VCR parts look like. If I can't do the repairs myself,then I will call a repair shop..and nearly always it's going to cost more to repair something,than it's actually worth. The worst was a digital camera I bought...when it tore up,I called a repair shop. I paid $150 for the camera a few years ago,and to get it repaired now would cost $185 minimum! That's unbelievable.

 

Unfortunate, but not really "unbelievable".

As consumer electronics get smaller and cheaper, specialized tools and equipment are needed to troubleshoot and repair them. Because of the high level of integration, typical repairs take at least a couple of hours, most of which is spent just trying to get at the part you need to replace! Most of the parts in a camcorder are specific to that manufacturer, and not available from anyone BUT the manufacturer, who charges accordingly. Some manufacturers will not sell replacement parts or repair information to anyone except their own "authorized" service centers.

All these factors have combined to force the average repair costs up, while the purchase prices go down. Most small repair shops have closed in the last decade for precisely these reasons. It simply isn't POSSIBLE to repair most consumer electronics at an economical price, while making enough profit to purchase all the equipment and pay the increasingly skilled technicians required to do so.

 

.

 

Yeah, the only tubes you might find in a camcorder these days are the cold-cathode lamps that backlight the LCD panel. When camcorders first came out, both the image sensor and the viewfinder display were vacuum tubes.

Those old drugstore tube testers were often intentionally miscalibrated to read on the low side, so that only a new or really strong tube would read in the green "OK" scale. Great for replacement tube sales! Even properly adjusted, they weren't very good testers in the first place. They would identify a totally worn-out tube or a burned-out filament, but not much more than that. A better tube tester would require too many switch settings and too much skilled interpretation to be a "Harry Homeowner" type of device.

 

.

 

.

 

The ultimate resolution on a color CRT or LCD is limited by the size of the individual pixels or phosphor dots/stripes. A B/W CRT has a continuous phosphor coating, so the resolution is much finer, limited primarily by how finely the scanning electron beam can be focused.

Somewhere in my junkbox I have an old camcorder viewfinder with a tiny color CRT. Maybe 1.5" diagonal screen size. If I ever come across another of these, they might make an interesting VR helmet viewer.....

 

.