Omelette making, digicam style
We used to have a couple of Canon point-and-shoot cameras, but they died mysteriously and forced me to go out and buy a Pentax to replace them. But, since we’d spent over US$500 for the two of them (not, of course, that I’m bitter; the *istDS has lasted 4 years now, which is thrice the lifespan of the A70 and almost that much more than the A60) we couldn’t bring ourselves to throw them out or otherwise mangle them.
Until today, when I finally found a reason to gut out a camera and see whether it would be feasable to use a point-and-shoot camera as the basis for a digital camera back for an Auto 110. It’s probably not possible to do it with the A70 (but I *did* find out why it had just stopped working; the power zoom in the camera was driven by plastic gearing, and the crown gear on the lens barrel had lost several teeth and thus its will to live) but that’s more an issue of the 3/8th inch (diagonal) sensor in the camera (and the resulting 2x crop factor on an already highly cropped film) than the size of the parts.
The really funny thing about dismantling the A70 is the processor board, which is an 80186-clone, running some sort of DOS. I wonder if I could find one of the old versions of Interactive Unix and load it on this system; it would be a shame to not fully use a super-tiny PC as a Unix machine.