Jason's photos -> 2002 -> StyleCam Blink Photos

Blink photos

A few photos from my nifty SiPix StyleCam Blink $40 digital camera. Horrible dynamic range (less than even the pickiest slide films), slow ISO equivalency (I'd guess around ISO50), horrid barrel distortion, weak color fidelity, an auto-white-balance mechanism on crack, severe blurring towards the edges of the lens (Rachel says this is because of the spherical lens design, in which case it would be like this on most Blink cameras). It waits a couple seconds after you press the shutter before it does anything. Questionable metering. Parallax distortion (or plain old viewfinder inaccuracy) to the point where there's no real reason to bother looking through the viewfinder. Shooting pictures indoors is definitely not recommended--keep it in the sunlight if you want anything reasonable.

In short, I love this camera. It is reminiscent of the delightful Lomo cameras.

Going by the Windows drivers files, the SiPix camera uses a "DSC-06" camera-guts core from DXG Technologies. DXG's web site has a lack of actual information on it, so I wouldn't bet money on this or anything.

2002-06-17 update: My Blink called to me and told me it wanted to be opened. I saw:

A Winbond W986416CH 8Mbyte SRAM memory module
A Winbond W27C520-212 64kbyte EEPROM.
A big chip, probably some sort of CPU or ASIC containing a CPU core, which probably does all the main camera control, labeled
MX MX88L60AQ EO213 T13257K1 43BCX
A small chip behind the CMOS sensor (handles the CMOS sensor I/O?), labeled
ATMEL214 93C86 SI27

The lens assembly has the plastic lens which is externally exposed, then a thin piece of plastic or glass to filter IR light, and then the CMOS sensor. There is no shutter. The IR filter whispered to me that it wanted to be removed, so I did. Reassembly was not difficult.

NB: You can easily move between photos by using the "n" and "p" keys.