Gadgetory

hey I'm Jason Hyder and welcome to CNET's cracking open where we crack open some of the best technologies that you can find most interesting devices most interesting stuff and we show you what's inside so bill what are we gonna crack open today yeah so today we have the Polaroid snap touch instant digital camera it's kind of a mouthful to say right but it's a really cool device basically we have a camera that's stuck to a printer that allows you to get that instant gratification after you take a photo at a little bit and print out one of these really cool I think 2 by 3 inch prints that so you can hand out to your friends print multiple copies put them in a scrapbook whatever you want to do it's really kind of neat and we wanted to find out how do you actually marry Oh camera at a printer so now this takes you back to that 1970s experience it's where you have the instant gratification of I've got one little device click the shutter and immediately I get a little print so we're gonna look at how they've pulled that off right yep so on the Polaroid snap touch this one makes what makes it different than the Polaroid regular Polaroid snap camera is it has a touchscreen a little digital touchscreen LCD on the back if we to start cracking this open what we're gonna do and this is how you load the paper we're gonna open up the touchscreen here pappa so that touch screen lets you edit the photos that's right you can apply our new filters you can select how many you want to print out there are some minor edits that you can make inside the camera and we're going there's one small screw now luckily this is a Phillips just a regular Phillips it's very small so this is a double zero or a triple zero screwdriver so you can remove this small screw like that and once that comes out what we can do is we can actually remove this plastic housing this part of the plastic housing so we're gonna start around here and luckily this is gonna pop up it's gonna pop open we're gonna be real gentle with the plastic you can kind of see it's already started loose in there now that we have one of the screw released there's just a single screw and then we're gonna pop this around again we're gonna be real pretty gentle gentle and precise remember Bill has the hands of a brain surgery and the patients and mother Teresa so you gotta really take it easy there we go not force it and with that we can lift off this piece of plastic housing and once we do that we can see there are more screws here here around the outer edges of the cameras plastic shell that we can that we need to remove so we're gonna go ahead and remove the four screws one on each edge and once we do this we should be able to remove the front cover part of the last eggshell and start getting to the inside you know it's what's really interesting about this camera is the zinc as e-ink paper so this cameras helps put out by CA marketing the company the company that actually puts the camera out it's just licensed under the Polaroid Polaroid name the Z ink paper is really kind of cool the crystals that are embedded in the paper actually clear and what happens is as the printer applies heat they turn and there there are different levels within the paper yes they they turn different colors based on the amount of heat that's applied in the area and supplied in so that's how it's able to print the you know to print the pictures now once we have the screws removed we can remove the front cover again we're gonna be real careful here I'm just using my fingernails because mine are just pretty strong and I'm not worried about breaking them because they're they're not really long so we had the plastic a front cover separated here we've got it separate from the print and we can just lift that off and right now we get I set that aside for right now and we get our first look inside the camera and we can already see some of the components standing right out here we of course have the battery pack over here we can see the actual camera sensor right there we can see the printer mechanism over here on the left side here the camera and we can see a few of the chips already on one of the circuit boards that are in here so excellent so we're gonna go ahead and the first thing one of the first things I almost like to do with these devices is disconnect the battery this is a fairly large battery of course it has to power or store enough power to power the flash the capacitor that powers this flash but the battery has to be kind of beefy we're gonna be real careful not break the battery we're gonna remove this first so we can lift the battery right out like this and then we're going to I'm gonna stomp it out in I don't like to pull on cables too much so I really want to get close to the connectors we're going to disconnect the battery here this one actually happens to be an 88.1 for what our 1,100 milliamp hour battery it's seven point four volts pretty good size battery we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna start removing a few more screws inside the device here virtually I'm gonna try and take apart is we're gonna remove the screws here from the main or from one of the system boards that are in here right while you're doing that we could talk a little bit about what people you know could use these devices for this prints on two by three sheets of paper as we've talked about and these things again you don't have to buy any ink no no ink you only buy the paper a 30-pack of these sheets is about 15 bucks on Amazon so here's about 50 cents a photo which isn't bad considering people are using these for marketing purposes as well so if you have a company event you can take a bunch of these photos of people they're your clients and then create a nice board that you could have in your office after the event we've seen some really creative things that people have done with these um this device retails at about a hundred and eighty bucks yep right but the regular time is about a hundred bucks ninety nine this 179 Lux and it's a 13 megapixel camera on great when compared to a 10 megapixel camera I believe on the regular snap okay it's not the greatest of cameras but it's good enough and it did some fun pictures it does and that's so that touch this device gets you a little bit higher megapixel obviously a little bit better quality camera and the ability to not necessarily print everything every to really be so more selective of which things you want to pray what printing beforehand that yeah that's really what's helpful like you said do some filters as beautiful filters so where we got some of the screws removed from the from them from the camera what I call the camera board here where we have to be really careful there are a few of these what are called flat flexible cables here and unfortunately with these connectors there isn't really a gate to flip up or anything like that that I found and so they're just sort of pressure fit in there yeah got to be I want to be very careful I don't want to tear the cables I don't want to rip the cables so I use a pair of yes these safe tweezers to grip the cables trying not to grip it trying to use my fingers or not grip it in a manner that would fracture the cable that we cut one of the wire leads inside the cable be real careful and we always learn a lot about these devices when you do them but you're being careful because we always try to take them apart with an eye of putting them back together in working order because we know a lot of our our readers our users viewers that they want to do the same thing right that sometimes they're taking these things apart to repair in this case you know there's not really you're probably not taking this device apart to repair we're taking it apart to learn more about the device and understand it and I just wanted to see how do you marry a camera and a printer together into a single device right oh that was really kind of cool sometimes it's kind of like you know what is it a Reese's Cup peanut butter and chocolate together we want them to figure out that you smash together a camera and a printer this you can see here we've got what I call the printer board out because this is what's connected to the printer printer assembly and it has the control chips on it for the printer assembly this is a synaptics what they call their imaging smart system-on-a-chip printer controller and image processor and then it also has 64 Meg's of ddr2 sdram on it as well so this is the circuit board that actually prints those images out to the printer assembly which hangs off and a little bit below that if I can turn it like this we're gonna remove this here now if this is the camera board below that and that's what's responsible for taking the actual photos right you can also see on here a little memory card slot right there so this does have I believe it has a little bit of internal storage but obviously you want to use a little micro SD memory card there's we're about more storage for photos so I've got the screws removed and now what we're gonna do is we're going to see if we can't lift the camera control board out of here I might have to I might have to remove the printer module first make it a little easier so with this out of the way we can lift this up I can also get to there we go I can also get to a few of more flat flexible ribbon cables where I was talking about those we're gonna go ahead and disconnect those so we can remove the board there's one this one goes up this one right here goes up to the the flat are the the button and the flash assembly up here the button control assembly and then ah here's one something that's really interesting about this device so if we flip this over this is the cable for the LCD screen I'm going to take this apart and I'm gonna separate it just like that now a little admission here yeah I actually crack this open for the scene the upcoming summer episode of the C net magazine and so we'd already cracked open one of these and this is one of the things that's really interesting about cracking these open so this cable if the cameras can get a really tight a close shot of it this cable here ghost runs to the LCD screen and it runs from the camera board to the LCD screen on the other camera that I took apart for the CNET magazine there was a separate contact that ran along the outside of this cable that was soldered to the board and so we actually even have the solder gun sitting behind me that I was ready to use to take this apart because I kind of knew what was coming this camera same camera Polaroid snap touch yeah there's no solder connection on it so they had no clue so somewhere mid production process the manufacturing process actually changed they got a different supplier they got you know a newer version of this LCD screen which didn't need that solder point yeah which obviously is probably cheaper during the manufacturing process because it takes less time to do that kind of soldering so anyway that's really interesting to find that there's no solder point in this magazine and that's one of the reasons what we we've been doing this all these years because even within the same devices sometimes you find you learn new things all right so with that yellow we have the camera control board pull off this little bit of sort of sort of yeah thermal sticky there and there's a couple of things that are really kind of interesting we have the camera if I want I can use one of my little plastic tools and I should be able to I don't think it's it's not soldered down to it so we can pull this right off but right and so you can see the camera right here a little 13 megapixel camera this camera shoots I think at it'll shoot 1080i think I'll shoot 1080p yeah it'll shoot 1080 Full HD video to this obviously can't link the video but it'll camera that would be very innovative yeah if you can print a video and here on the attached to the camera control board here we have a couple things they're kind of interesting to talk about right here this is an eye catch technology camera sock or system-on-a-chip there's another hundred and twenty eight Meg macron ik's NAND flash module that's up there this this this internal storage lets you store up to ten photos without using the micro sd look like I said you need the micro SD card if you want to store any more than that and so some of the smaller chips that are on here they're really hard to see over on the back if I flip this over here there is a is the 16 78s bluetooth dual mode sock on this there is a speaker so you have a speaker at the at the bottom you also have a microphone here that's pointed to the front to record video and the microSD card slot for the external memory card micro USB port yeah and then you have a contact for the reset button so they pack a lot onto these little circuit boards because that's the that's the brains of the camera really right there and as you're alluding to with this camera it's not just for printing photos you can actually save photos and video with this device to watch later so it is a a functional digital camera basic digital camera as well and so we're now gonna remove I open the back door so he it comes out a little easier I was catching on this little metal contact here and so we're gonna remove the printer assembly so here all as one piece we can actually see the little zero ink printer assembly as you were talking about yeah this is basically a very printer assembly it's essentially the same or training similar to the one that's in the other Bluetooth printer that just doesn't have the camera mounted to the top of it yeah and Polaroid zip which is also available for $100 it's just basically like bill said it's a bluetooth printer for your for your phone pictures or tablet all right so here we have another one of the components that we have this is the power button slash shutter release a shutter release button contact yeah that will set aside and then the last thing to remove if you really want to you can actually if this is the LCD screen right here um when you see the last cable here if we want to remove it it actually has just two little pins in the side here that I think they just pull out they're not screws or anything they just pull out like that one out you pull one of them out and you can separate the LCD here from the plastic body there's a couple of springs it'll fault that hold it that helped it pop up yep and then the other pin is in the other side they're just sort of pressure fit with a little bit of a little bit of an adhesive there to kind of hold them in place and there you go that's it that's all there is to it it's yeah it was a really fun because it was really interesting to see how you can take a digital printer and how you can marry that to a camera put it all on together one package and create a fun little device to use it's cool because if you think about it you know camera printer right there the rest of this is sort of some brains to help it function and pull it together you know the touchscreen to help select your pictures do a little bit of editing and as we talked about their fun personal uses even some business uses co-op with this device as well so another successful cracking open alright remember you can find cracking open photos for all of the devices we've torn into on TechRepublic and you can see all of our cracking open videos of all the devices that we've done on CNET and cns YouTube channel so leave us a note in the comments if you have a device you'd like to see us cracking open we're always looking for something new to take apart and learn about alright thanks for watching we'll see you next time you