The first digital camera that I owned was a Canon Powershot S1 IS. It’s an ultrazoom camera with a 10x lens, and takes photos at up to 3.2 megapixels. The Powershot S1 IS was the first of the Powershot S IS series cameras which ended with the Powershot S5 IS and has now changed to the Powershot SX IS series this year. The S1 was first announced back in February 2004. I bought mine in May 2005, as it was being phased out to make way for the succeeding S2 model. It was the first digital camera I owned. Since then I have owned A400, A450, A460 and S5 IS models and am now looking at buying a Powershot A2000 or A2100 in the near future. The S1 has worked well up until now, a fault has caused the display to kind of lose vertical hold, or display a scrambled picture instead of a normal image. I could have got it repaired but it’s hardly worthwhile, so I decided to dismantle it to see what was inside. So this series of articles chronicles the exploding of the camera. These photos are from my Picasa albums and are stored there at their original 5 megapixel size so you can see the smaller details in the photos. Some of the earlier photos in the series are slightly blurred. I’m checking the photos more carefully for the rest of the pictures to ensure this doesn’t happen so much, but it’s just a fact that with pictures taken on macro, there will be some blurring due to lack of depth of field. Most of the pictures are reasonably sharp, some very; Picasa, Blogger or WLW seems to have problems generating sharp previews for me when writing this article.
The basic camera with all the attachments removed. That is, batteries out, strap and lens cover taken off. In other words this is what a fully functional camera looks like. At the end of this process the camera will be in pieces and fully unfunctional.
Not every picture in the album is reproduced in this post; view the album for additional pictures.
From this point I started removing every screw I could find on the camera. Most of them were in obvious places.
The first part I managed to get off the camera was the back cover of the rotating LCD screen. Oddly enough, this cover is one of the few metal parts of this camera; the coating on the outside of it would make you think it was made of plastic.
At this point I gave up using gentle pressure and started levering parts off the camera to get inside. First off was the little cover on the left that incorporates the four way selector and the Set and Menu buttons. You can see the little buttons under the selector.
To finish off this first article in the series, we have two shots of the camera with the main front and rear panels removed. Here is the back first. The LCD screen is unfolded out to the left. In the top left corner you can see the flash capacitor on the left of the viewfinder. A lot of electronic circuitry is visible. The tripod mount is surrounded by the circuit board that mounts the I/O sockets. The battery door and the Compact Flash card slot are bottom-right.
Front view. On the left is the battery compartment and the lens of course is next to it. Wrapped around the near side of the lens is the ultrasonic motor and drive mechanism for the lens. Above it you can see that flash cap. Otherwise there’s not a lot to see, we still have to get the top off to expose more bits of the camera.