EW0053 - Hitachi VM-S83E SVHS-C Video Camera Teardown 

Thank you. There are many more to come!

Thanks.

Thank you. Good to hear. I will do more videos as fast as I can.

Thanks. Glad you liked it.

Thanks. It is a bit sad, capacitors ruin all the fun.

I like the challenge of putting these things back together. Most of the things I did teardown are back together even if not shown on the video. This one I decided to scrap it is a bit far gone with all the mess on the boards. A shame. Nice camera apart from that. Most of the time those view finders can be used as a standalone video monitor. Supply it with 5V, 9, 12V depending on what it needs and a composite video signal and away it goes. Tiny TV. Not very practical but it is fun to see.

@@Elecami That's good to know. I have an old camcorder, the kind where the VCR portion was a separate unit carried in a shoulder sling bag, basically a full sized VCR that ran on batteries. I'll have to see if I can do anything with the tiny little viewfinder TV.

@@00Skyfox In my experience, those type of cameras are the ones that might not have a fully integrated view finder. The National brand cameras I looked at the view finder needed external sync provided to it and the power supply was weird. Those cameras had largish 1"(maybe) viewfinders.

@@Elecami I think you may be right. The camera is an Olympus VX-308-U video camera, and based on the manuals in the bag it came with the Olympus VC-106A-U VCR, plus a TV tuner unit. I found a couple different pinouts for 10-pin plugs like what it has but I can't find anything specific to this camera, so I don't know whether it follows the EIAJ standard. I can power it up with 12V and the viewfinder CRT does work, but it will not display anything aside from a little box on the side that moves up and down corresponding to the exposure. The auto focus appears to be operating and I can switch it to manual focus but nothing else works (with manual iris I can make the little box in the viewfinder move up and down). The power light is supposed to be green when it's on, but it stays red as if it's in standby. Without having a VCR with a 10-pin video camera connection to test it with, I really have no idea what kind of signals it's looking for. I'd send it to you if I could and let you tinker with it and tear it down because I don't know what else to do with it.

@@00Skyfox The 10 Pin Connector should be standard. The only ones I know that are not standard are the really old black and white systems where the VCR sent sync to the camera. All the 10 pin color cameras I have come across use the same pinout. You only need to supply to supply them with 12V and they will work. View Finders are not consistent though. I am wondering if the camera you have is similar to a JVC GX-N70, I have one and will make a video of it at some point. There are a lot to get through.

Glad to help.

If it is similar age to mine then I think there will be power supply and other issues due to old leaking capacitors. The loading motor driver could be faulty and causing the loading motor to always run in the unload direction.

They do sadly.

@@Elecami luckily I'm good at recapping some camcorders.