micro HDMI may very well be the worst
mainstream connector on the market it's super compact while still carrying the
same high quality video signals of its bigger more competent brother but it is
the very definition of an achilles heel
this four dollar part four dollars turned a 3
000 camera into a paperweight and the
cost to have it repaired by a sony authorized service center
500 freedom dollars that
is why today i will be taking matters into my own hands that is why right to
repair matters and that is why i'm going to tell you about our sponsor in case i
screw up this camera and i have to buy a new one build redux build redux makes it
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let's begin with a bit more backstory when i was shooting the sponsored
ultimate streaming setup video for elgato a little while ago i was struck
by how much more comfortable that setup was to use compared to my one at home
and the reason for that is that at home
i have to crank my key lights up so bright that they're uncomfortable to
look at in order to get a clean image out of my cheap canon camera which got
me thinking i'm not about to downgrade to a webcam but if i want a dslr or a
mirrorless that has outstanding low light performance so i can turn those
lights down what are my options here's one how about the a7s2 that we already
own here at the studio but we haven't been using because it's broken
i mean it's not completely broken i can
turn it on and wait were we expecting that to happen did it magically start
working uh this is inconvenient but also i'm happy
ah okay
this is one of those situations where it's it's working enough that it knows it's
supposed to be working now just to demonstrate that it's not
the cable what is this uh s5
oh yep there we go confirmed tv works
cable works actually this is a this is a really important thing to bring up you
guys might wonder why exactly the fact that the micro HDMI
port on this camera not working is even a problem for us here in the studio and
the answer is that while the camera does have a built-in display
usually in a production environment you'd need a much larger one in order to
make sure that you're maintaining focus so we'd hook up something like this external monitor from small hd that
means that every hour this camera's in operation it's got something plugged
into its micro HDMI port which eventually and we're talking in a matter
of tens of hours or hundreds of hours not thousands of hours
it is going to break 50 bucks gets you high quality solder flux and wick with
the necessary applicators you'll spend anywhere from 25 to 100 depending on how
baller you want to go for some kind of precision screwdriver set you'll need
another hundred dollars in change for a soldering iron and a hot air station and
20 bucks for a mystery 21 ounce water bottle from lttstore.com
and even after buying all of that stuff you are still going to be out ahead of
what you would have spent on someone else doing it for you and now you own
all these tools which is pretty cool honestly the biggest factor for me
though was that i have nothing to lose if i break it so what i was already
gonna have to replace it anyway and the only thing i really had to buy was 20
worth of micro HDMI ports so since this operation can clearly be done
we actually found a guide on how to do it online though it
omits the actual soldering because that's a service this person offers and
his name isn't louis rossman
i think we can put together the missing pieces here so this is where the
scripted portion of this video ends and i start disassembling this camera
wish me luck everybody got an exploded view of the camera right here and i
talked to callanan who actually used to do a fair bit of this work at his old
job and he says we are going to go in from the bottom and the back so that is
where we'll start
yeah this should be fine let's just see if it's loosened at all
whoa hi yep look at that
yep plate came right off wait and oh
whoa that was exciting moment seems to be
hampering me a little bit here i think i have to actually take the
screen off and disconnect the ribbon on this side
hold on i got this though i got this i'll get this all labeled in a sec
famous last words
yep there we go look at that is that a vapor chamber or
is that just a copper spreader oh wow that's interesting look they're carrying
heat way up here man i'm stressed i get really warm
when i work on stuff like this like i don't want to break it
and i also don't want to not get content out of it
and i feel like if i break it it's not really a video i can't get it out past
the sticker you might just have to force it a little there we go would you look at that
did you just look at that wow it's actually really easy to change
out the card slot this is as far in as you have to go and
they've got it on its own daughter board so boom new sd card slot
just like that because that's something i could see failing a lot too
everything's under control also this copper shield is off now more
cooling uh we've got made by micron
presumably this is dram we've got sony's
image processor uh wow this folded cable here is looks
pretty challenging no no that's fine that's fine it's fine
it's just a sticker calm down brandon calm down you're stressing everybody out
chill time to start popping out the dozen or
so ribbon cables all around this main board the good news is that the the
cable memory should pretty much tell us where they all go back in
look at that
easy peasy easy
more cooling more thermal pads oh wow so i misidentified this i think that i had
said this looked like the main processor but i actually doubt that now and i had
also said that maybe this was dram but i doubt that now too because
this pin pattern looks like dram
and it sits right under what looks like it might be
some kind of integrated package i don't know much about the architecture of a
camera this is all just kind of me making things up as i go so take it
for what it is and that's it that's the culprit
right there oh wow it's mangled
no wonder it's broken the thing is it's not just like the
resiliency of the pins inside you gotta understand there's a lot of strain on it
from the weight of the cable and there's just no real getting around that
okay it's getting real now oh god i did not
label a thing i'm gonna write pcb question mark i'm pretty sure it is
sanity check let's make sure we're removing the right thing here we want
this guy cool right this feels like a lot of heat to be
putting on this if we're having trouble getting it off we can try adding a
little bit of flux not too much not that it'll harm
anything but come on baby one moment please
i'm starting to feel like this might have been a mistake go
actually i think it's loosening i think i got it loose on the one side come on
come on come on come on come on come on hey there we go
oh my god now we need our soldering iron and our wick
i named him john so we're just going to pick up all of our extra solder with
this bad boy i've got most of the through holes
cleared now i think it's clean
here's the backside looks pretty good we've got five tries
at this i have five micro HDMI connectors so here's the plan
i'm gonna take this guy i'm gonna put it right there
and all of those need to go exactly on all of those pads so we take this
and we put some of the solder kind of over these contact points here and kind
of spread it around a little bit
that is not good let's just get rid of this again
you can see there's a giant ball of solder uh across two pins in a couple of
places here so i did put a little bit too much to grab the extra solder we're
just going to take our tip which is clean and we're just going to throw some
flux on there and we're going to try and
kind of loosen that up and grab it so now basically what we flow it and go for
it okay let's flux it up baby
here we go shine for me baby
this little light of mine
i'm gonna let it shine
once it's all silvery we just go for it
oh god i blew it away oh boy
okay so we have a slight problem
when i put the heat
on the micro HDMI it melts the plastic
so basically
i need to heat it up and then instantly
absolutely nail the placement of this thing
oh my god go on there hold still
oh we were close that time it's not that it's off it's that the
plastic melted and it looked like the back pins were
on still but it's hard to tell okay all right i give up for today
oh that is a that's a shame we're back ladies and
gentlemen and we got solutions kyle from engineering said hey guys you need a hot
plate well we don't have a hot plate and we don't have time to wait around
for one so we've got a hot brick
145 degrees celsius ladies and gentlemen
we baked that brick like the boss as we are
now it's time to take another run at this without this giant ground plane
here sucking up all the heat that we're trying to use to desolder our shiz
so we'll get our let's get our hot air station we're going to try and pull this
micro HDMI that we did manage to put on last time but didn't connect fully
and we're getting up near 100 a hundo
here we go
oh oh that's a hot brick yep
there we go and did it okay it's off again
oh is it mangled you know what i think this might have
actually survived andy i think we can take another crack with
this play do you believe i believe yeah so i guess uh that's a that's a
pretty big shot to your credibility right there
the only reason that we're not putting flux on right now by the way is that
there's already um like an ocean of flux on this thing
oh i can't do this left-handed i just need to be able to steady my hand
oh god stop
it's so sticky so i have a slight problem
a couple of the pins have bridged
solder on them yep this one's a fail well this is our last crack at it
falls oh god i think this is it i think this
is the moment i need the microscope to know if it's
lined up it ain't aligned
see if the goal was to have it perfectly
in between the pads then hashtag nailed it okay i'm trying to
pull this off as cleanly as i can here
because if i bend these pins we're not going to be able to
put it back on i think i got it
should i go for gold and try the last connector
because i think part of the problem is that this one's got some gunk on it it's
making it hard to get it in place it is lined up
i'm gonna go check under the microscope i got the sign off from kyle he says
that it doesn't appear as though what
is going on here how did this happen one of these ribbons
is busted shoot
that is not repairable um unfortunately
now the question becomes do i need that where does it go i was hoping to put it
together just a little to see if it fires back up
and if we can test it before we completely close it up
oh i'm so upset right now i actually cannot tell
where this plugs into right now so why don't we just
leave it for the time being see what happens
wow this is an absolute nightmare to install
i don't know how they build these things at the factory the issue is just that there's no way to
get my fingers in there and apply any force to it whatsoever it's just
i'm just relying on the stiffness of the
ribbon to go to push it in but it's not enough oh my god go
get the f in there i don't understand this
god my level of pissed off is so high right now
so if i'm lucky the functions that are not
connected will be ones that i don't need i would have to get
extremely lucky for that though
like we're talking horseshoes up my ass lucky
i say if we get a signal from the HDMI port we
we end the video there even though the camera itself is not
fixed because that was the goal definitely makes me feel better about
how much cameras cost i did plug in what remains of the ribbons so ow
it's entirely possible that it is still plugged in okay so no sd card reader but
everything else should fundamentally be connected
no life no smoke no sparks but no life so i need
a new top housing among other things okay well we have to
call it here for now we'll have to resume once we get some replacement
parts ordered we're gonna do this
i'm gonna hate every moment
oh thank god oh i have to pull the whole thing out
yeah that's what i thought why do you need to pull that out though
because it's connected to the main one no
i have to take it apart even more
hey there we go okay so i think if we stop at this point
like filming i can figure out the soldering off
camera because honestly
that's gonna be long and boring a few moments later
all right time to put this back together
all right before i fully close this out yeah
we usually would get a oh yeah it works
everything flickered which is good
it is now some time later and the saga is finally over
as it turns out the original board the one that i fixed actually does work it
just powers off intermittently which might be due to damage from the heat of
the soldering iron we learned a valuable lesson about preheating your entire
board before going at it which is great but unfortunately it did cost us a new
board which was just under 400 us dollars
that was installed courtesy of this guy
thanks and we were getting this really weird awful green output so initially we
thought okay maybe we screwed up a cable or something like that but as it turns
out the potential need for sony software
or calibration was a very real need so we ended up needing to send it to a sony
service center pay about 200 to get our sensor calibrated for this particular
border rather the board calibrated for this particular sensor and now it works
absolutely perfectly in fact you already saw me
deploy it in the video where i showed off my new gaming setup it's
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first purchase if you guys enjoyed this video you might
enjoy the series where we water cooled a red 8k camera it was quite a bit more
successful