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Toward environmentally friendly lead-free mounting
The main jobs of the Tatsuno site associated with the E-1 are PCB mounting, machining the mirror frame and assembling the lenses of the interchangeable lens, and assembling the camera body.
Yoshio Takahashi, who is in charge of PCB mounting for the E-1, is originally from the technology development division, where he was involved with studying the elimination of lead from various designs. The directives on recycling electrical and electronic devices (WEEE & RoHS) adopted by the European Union Council will prohibit the use of lead in electronic devices starting in 2006. In response, we have been studying the elimination of lead for the past 3 years, and we definitely wanted to accomplish this for the E-1 camera, our most advanced model.
"If you go lead-free, you are faced with the problem of what to use for solder.
A camera PCB uses many special components that are much more susceptible to heat
than ordinary electronic components. The most common lead-free solder is an alloy
of tin, silver and copper, but this material must be heated to a temperature of
230°C to 250°C. This is too hot for camera mounting. Lead has a low melting
point (183°C), and is also strong, which made it a convenient alloy to use."
"It was taken as a given that an alloy of tin and lead will be used for mounting. When we started looking for a substitute for lead, we came to study a zinc-based alloy of tin, zinc, and bismuth. This jumped into our sights as a good possibility, because it will melt in a range of 196°C to 197°C. However, zinc-based solders are only used in a tiny handful of fields, and technical data and the like are extremely rare. We had no choice but to verify it by hand."
"The conditions for using solder also changed, requiring quite a bit of revision of our tools and other equipment."
There are only one or two manufacturers mass producing the cream solder we use in the E-1 PCBs. For tin/silver/copper alloys, the silver pushes up the price. With the cheaper price of zinc, however, it is thought that in the future, it will become more popular. "Manufacturers tend to avoid zinc, since it is difficult to handle, but OLYMPUS' Image System Company has decided to go with the zinc-based alloy as its main solder."
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Yoshio Takahashi
Electronic Surface Mount Group, Manufacturing Department
Olympus Opto-Technology Co., Ltd.
The first OLYMPUS product he owned as the PEN-F. Came up with a lead-free solder for E-1 mounting, taking advantage of the mounting techniques he cultivated working with film SLRs, compact cameras, and digital cameras, along with his instincts.
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Light, small, and strong lens mirror frames
Hideyuki Komamura is an expert metal worker. He says he was
quite aware of the level of precision required for machining the ZUIKO DIGITAL
mirror-frame. "4/3 is smaller than other companies," he says, "and if you are
going to give it high image quality on top of that, that naturally increases the
level of precision required for the lens's mirror frame. Although it is a structurally
complex shape, making the lens lighter is a key point for differentiating us from
our competition. For this reason, we lowered the thickness of the mirror frame
to 1 mm, from 2 mm back in the OM days. This makes machining even harder."
The dimensional precision required is quite severe: Taking the dimensions of the inner diameter as an example, while the OM had a tolerance of 2 hundredths of a millimeter, with the E-1 the tolerance is 1 hundredth of a millimeter.
"When you work with aluminum, there is cutting resistance, and stress remains in the material. This stress can be released by cutting notches or the like into the metal, but the thinner the walls, the greater impact this has on precision. So passing each of these requirements is the toughest problem," he states, describing the path he took to reach the high precision required.
As soon as these problems are resolved, manufacturing time and cost becomes an issue. But that didn't deter Komamura: "We will machine the parts twice as fast as with conventional methods, in other words at half the cost," he vowed. Twice as hard, twice as precise, but at half the cost. There was no room for compromise in such tough targets.
As with the OM series, the same strong 5,000-series aluminum alloy was used for the mirror frame. "But the common wisdom on aluminum cutting said that what we wanted to do was far beyond the realm of theoretical possibility. Minimizing cutting resistance is a specialized field of metal working, and it has been studied exhaustively."
Komamura's passion for the subject comes out when he speaks. We asked him his thoughts on the 4 lenses that are soon to go on sale.
"I think that the 300-mm ZUIKO DIGITAL and the others are really going to surprise people."
A 300-mm ZUIKO DIGITAL corresponds to a 600-mm telephoto lens on a film camera. Yokoyama, who designed them, agrees: "The telephoto lens is where we can best harness the advantages of the Four Thirds system. The small image circle allows for quite a bit of miniaturization."
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Hideyuki Komamura
Technology Metal Production Group, Manufacturing Department
Olympus Opto-Technology Co., Ltd.
Supporting the camera lens team, the tougher the precision requirements that are placed on the metal working of the mirror frames he is responsible for, the more his fighting spirit burns. While following the trends in other companies, his eyes never stray from the digital cameras he is responsible for. |
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