Radio Psychedelica

I was given a broken Vivatar 3826 Digital Still Camera. Its previous owner had smashed the lens off of it - accidently, I assume, and not in a fit of pique. Its names a misnomer, because it can take video as well. That capacity didn't excite me as I shoot very little video, and still use a old VHS camcorder. (Yes I know, its archaic technology, and not quite old enough yet to be hiply retro.)
I adapted a SLR camera lens to it. Most of my lenses are 52mm screw mount, so I cut down a screw on lens cap and glued that to the body of the camera after working out what seemed like the best spacing.
The flash was broken, so I unplugged the flash's circuit board and removed it. I had to cut the power leads to the flash board. The camera did not seem to care. Apprantly, it uses a timer to geuss when the flash capacitor is at full charge rather then some sort of feedback. Makes sence really: the RC constant of the charger should only vary slightly, and within acceptable bounds.
removed the tiny moter that drove the internal zoom lens. This moter is the size of a pencil eraser and will prove quite useful for another project. The big moter (I use the term loosely) that drove the focusing I didn't bother to remove. I just used a sharp X-Acto knife to cut the flexible circuit traces that led to it. I was going to leave the moters in, but they tended to move when I pressed the shutter button due to an irritating 'focus' setting before the switch could move to 'shoot'. This would vibrate the CCD when I wanted itI still.

Shooting indoors with on 30 watts of Compact Flourescent for light - a dim enviroment - the camera did better than my unmodified Kodak EasyShare 7300. This is probably due to the much larger lens aperture.
I then tried to take a shot outside, with a sunny background:







Massive overexposure!
Trying all availible settings of f-stop and exposure time didn't help. The camera was designed under the assumption that it had the light gathering ability of a 6 mm wide lense, and I was feeding it through a 40 mm wide lens.
Thats around a 44 X increase in light gathering!
Useful at night, I suppose, but not very useful for garden parties.



I used a old amateur astromer trick to solve that problem. I blocked the mouth of the lens with duct tape, and used a washer as a makeshift diaphramn. This brought the apeture down to around 5 mm and the overexposure became a thing of the past.
It does make the camera look odd, though.

Next step is to put a new and improved shutter switch on it. The original one takes too much force, and I don't like its action.