As some of you may remember, I got a Kodak DCS-100 from ebay about a week ago (with help and advice from folks on this forum). It seems complete, and in very good condition. It works sometimes, but seems, at best, intermittent. The small display always works, but the big display often doesn't, or is garbled. I managed to take five photos, but most of the time the shutter doesn't work, and I don't know why. I lost the first two photos, because I think they only went to RAM, but the other three went to disk, but I lost them overnight. Often the front panel is flakey too, but I don't know why.
Inside, the camera and storage unit are both in great condition. The storage unit has a motherboard with nine slots, with six occupied. There's a CPU board, SCSI board, Memory board (with 8MB), LCD driver board, Video board and Camera Interface Board. I assume one or more of the free slots is to be used by the optional compression board. Everything is socketed. There's heavy use of Altera PLDs in PLCC packages, and the SCSI chips, CPU and PROM are all socketed. In the winder the A/D is socketed, as is the obligatory Altera CPLD. I tried re-seating everything, but it didn't make a difference. There's a dead Li battery on the CPU board, so I'll try replacing that. I assume that shouldn't make a difference to the operation, but I won't spend more time on debugging till I've replaced it. As there's nothing obviously wrong mechanically, and nothing is obviously overheated, it might be tricky to fix. Does anybody know if schematics are available?
I also have a question about the manual. It talks about the slots that were used for deleted images being unused for new images, and instead new images go after all previous images on the disk. The manual never says how (or even if) the empty slots are filled. I assume that, once the disk has been written to the end, the camera goes back and fills the empty slots. Anyone know if this is the case?
Thanks
Pete