disassembled

Sony Alpha 1 Teardown: The Inside of a Flagship Mirrorless Camera

The Sony flagship camera is here, the first of the mirrorless full-frame "holy trinity" of Sony, Canon, and Nikon to be released. Sony announced this beautiful beast back in January 2021, and today we’re going to take it apart, modify it into a full spectrum camera, and (hopefully) put it back together again.

This Dead $10,000 Camera Shows the Danger of Salt Water

LensRentals recently got back a $10,000 Fujinon GFX100 medium format mirrorless camera from a customer who used it in dive housing and reported that it "suddenly died for no reason." After Fuji declared repair impossible and insurance claims were paid, LensRentals decided to take the camera apart and look inside.

This Photo Was Shot with a Real $2M Lamborghini Taken Apart

Swiss photographer Fabian Oefner has created an eye-popping new photo showing a 1972 Lamborghini Miura SV disintegrating with its individual components exploding in all directions. Here's what's crazy: Oefner actually photographed the $2 million car, spending nearly 2 years shooting and stitching the parts.

A Teardown of the Canon EOS R

Want to see the internals of Canon's first full-frame mirrorless camera? Roger Cicala over at LensRentals disassembled the new Canon EOS R to look at the design and engineering going on inside.

Here’s a Teardown of a Leica M Camera

There are about 1,200 moving parts inside a Leica M rangefinder. In this 3.5-minute video, Tamarkin Camera in Chicago disassembles a Leica M give show what goes on inside the famous red dot cameras.

A Nikon F3 Exploded View Made Using Hundreds of Macro Photos

Photos of disassembled cameras are usually created by laying out the parts neatly and shooting a photo from above. James over at CasualPhotophile went a step further: he shot hundreds of macro photos of the individual components and stitched them together into an ultra-high-res "exploded camera" image of the Nikon F3.

I Bought a Holga Digital. Here’s a Hands-On Review.

I bought a Holga Digital through the Kickstarter fundraising campaign in August 2015. It is a fairly early model, so by the time you read this there might have been some tweaks or firmware updates.

I have never owned the original film Holga (or any medium format camera for that matter), so this review is based on the behavior of the Holga Digital camera on its own merit, not compared to its film predecessor.

Watch as a Vintage Fujica ST 705 is Disassembled and Neatly Framed

"How do you give a second life to an old film camera?," asks the French ad agency Maison Carnot. They had an old and non-functional Fujica ST 705 camera on their hands, so they decided to create a stop-motion video and a piece of art with it. It took the team a day to disassemble the camera into its basic pieces, select some choice components, and then arrange them neatly in a frame for display. The 2-minute video above is titled "DISASSEMBLY."

Sony a7R II Teardown Gives Us an Inside Look at the Mirrorless Beast

One camera that has generated a great deal of interest in recent days is the Sony a7R II, which packs the world's first BSI full-frame sensor, ISO 102400, and 4K video into a flagship mirrorless body.

The folks over at iFixit have just published a teardown of the a7r II, giving us a glimpse into the guts of the highly-anticipated camera body.

Silent Changes: The Subtle Modifications Made to Camera Gear Over Time

Every so often I get an email asking me to jump in on some forum argument or other. I rarely do that because of the language barrier.

Two of the common languages spoken on forums are CAKWAF (Complete, Absolute Knowledge Without Any Facts) and AFIDAWAB (Any Facts I Don’t Agree With Are Bullstuff). Since I am not fluent in those languages, I tend not to get involved in the more, uhm, enthusiastic online discussions. But sometimes I can’t help myself, repeating the behavior of adding facts to a ‘vigorous’ discussion and always expecting a different result.

These Schematics Offer an Exploded View of Old Nikon SLR Cameras

Want to see how old film single-lens reflex cameras were put together? Clare (Wyoh on Tumblr) recently found a number of camera schematics inside an old French magazine from decades ago. The schematics show exploded views of the Nikon F, Nikon F2, Nikon FM, and Nikon FA SLRs. Each camera is shown in its most basic parts, which are numbered and labeled (in French).

Disassembling a Tripod Ball Head to See How It Works

This will probably be of limited interest to most of you, but we like to know how things work, not just how well they work. We thought we’d take a couple of pictures when we disassembled a ballhead in case any of you were interested. Our demonstration partner today was a Benro B1 ballhead that had a stripped tension adjustment knob, but all ballheads work basically the same way.

Clever Typeface Created from Pieces of a Deconstructed Camera

We've shown a number of photos of disassembled cameras in the past, but 19-year-old London-based graphic design student Stefan Abrahams went a step further with his camera deconstruction project. Instead of simply arranging the individual components neatly, Abrahams decided to turn the pieces into a typeface.

A Teardown of the Popular Fujifilm X100

Goodbye old young friend. Let me give you all a piece of wisdom that I recently learned the hard way. If you go on a fishing trip called 'Hit em' Hard' and the captain tells you that you should take your bag off and put it in the 'dry container', what he really means by 'dry container' is a place that will fill up with seawater after he accidently clogs the drainage pipe, soaking you and your friends cameras, bags, wallets and cellphones for over an hour in salty seawater.

Better yet, just never go on a fishing charter with a name like 'Hit em' Hard.'

Teardowns of Nikon D600 Reveal Sony Sensor, Hard-to-Replace LCD Screen

Yesterday we featured a photographer's DIY teardown of the Nikon D700, offering a peek at the camera's guts. It was interesting, but a bit outdated since the camera was released back in July 2008. iFixit and Chipworks have just finish their own teardowns of a camera that's much more recent: the Nikon D600 "entry-level" full-frame DSLR.

Undressing a Sony NEX Camera

I have to say I have one of the better jobs on the planet, at least for a photography gear-head. The part I like best — well, really there’s a lot of parts I like best — but one fun part is that my job description includes: Take things apart. See how they work. Learn how to fix them.

Old Gadgets Taken Apart, Photographed, and Reassembled Digitally

The photographs in artist Max de Esteban's Proposition One project might look like X-Ray images, but they were actually captured with an ordinary camera. They were created by carefully deconstructing old gadgets, photographing them in "layers", then "reassembling" the gadgets digitally. You can see them on display through December 9th at Klompching Gallery in NYC

Pentax Spotmatic F SLR Completely Disassembled and Laid Out

What would it look like if you tripped and with a Pentax Spotmatic F camera in hand, and it somehow smashed neatly into its most basic components? Artist Todd McLellan gives us an idea by taking one apart, neatly arranging it on a table, and photographing it in a style similar to Carl Kleiner's IKEA baking book shots.