Teardown and on-the-fly analysis of the circuits found inside a Kappa CF15 CCD camera. I got the camera with my Nikon SMZ-2T stereo microscope, that I use for electronics repairs and component identification. The camera was defective and taking it apart really made for a pleasant surprise of complexity and a stuffed enclosure!
You might also be interested in a test and teardown of a huge broadcasting camera Sony BVP-7AP or a CCD sensor based webcam!
Kappa CF15 Printed Circuit Boards
The camera consists of 5 individual circuit boards, where one of them is a motherboard or backplane.
The circuit board marked VRBD130E2C / CMK-18X holds the image sensor. The camera uses a CCD sensor for the image acquisition. CCD is short for Charge-Coupled Device. It is a 2-dimensional array of coupled capacitors that can store a electric charge. Firstly each capacitor charges corresponding to one pixel and is charging proportional to the light intensity that it receives from the lens. Secondly a control circuit can read out each capacitor as a shift register, where each capacitor delivers its charge to the coupled capacitor next to it. In a analog camera like this, the values are processing as a continuous analog signal. Thirdly a charge amplifier and lowpass filter is used before transmission or encoding.
The CCD sensor connects to a circuit board marked VRYD130E1D. The main IC processing the image here seems to be a Mitsubishi MN51007LVH IC, no datasheets found. The AN2210S IC is a video camera signal processing circuit with built-in OB modulation, AGC and gamma correction.
The circuit board marked VRYD130E2B is the analog image processing boards. It is actually 4 additional smaller boards on a mainboard that is to say on a larger mainboard. A AN2210S IC, like mentioned above, along with the trimmers and shielded sections, give away its purpose. A unknown AN2361S IC sits at the back.
This circuit board is marked VRCD130E1B. It seems to be a filter and amplifier section.
Circuit board marked VRBD130E1B seems to hold the main processor of the entire camera assembly. The large IC MN1552CVY is unknown, but the smaller Mitsubishi M50450-010FP is a on-screen display controller for characters and patterns.
