dissection

I recently took a Polaroid picture photo, but it turned out to be a dud... so I decided to dissect it for science!

Here's a dissection video for those of you who like photography better than biology. It's a Khan Academy lesson that offers a glimpse into how digital cameras work on the inside. The camera being dissected is a Vivitar V25, a 2.1 megapixel camera that you can pick up for around $18 from places like Walmart. Although it's basically the digital equivalent of a disposable camera, the camera still shares some things in common with higher-end digital cameras. You might be able to learn an interesting thing or two about how your own camera works.

If you've ever wanted to know what the guts of a Nikon D5100 look like, iFixit just published a meticulously documented teardown of the camera. Aside from pointing out the various parts found in the body, an interesting conclusion the iFixit team came to was that the D5100 has a horrible "Repairability Score" of 2/10, where 10 is easiest to repair. The reason? "Approximately 4 billion screws hold the device together" (They're exaggerating, of course).