Digital camera differentiates itself by adding a second display

It must be difficult for digital still camera vendors to differentiate their products from those of competitors, at least in the eyes of consumers. They can compete on resolution, battery life, image quality, etc. But those features are hard for the consumer to visualize, at least while in the store making a purchase. When you can come up with something that's truly different, then you have something you can really sink your marketing teeth into.

That's what the designers at Samsung have come up with—a digital still camera with a truly differentiating feature. The TL225, which happens to be the object of my current Tear Down, is built with a secondary display. It has the usual 3.5-in. display on the back. But the key is that it has a secondary display, measuring 1.5-in., on the front side of the camera.

The Samsung TL225 digital camera offers a differentiating feature—a secondary display on the front side of the camera.

If you're a 40-something like me, you may question why there's a display on the front of the camera. But show that camera to one of your kids like I did, and they know exactly what it's for—to take a picture of yourself or you and your buddies together.

The key for Samsung was to not raise the BOM much beyond what's required for a single-display camera. And they seem to have achieved that. Taking the camera apart showed that there are two key ICs on the board in addition to the memory.

Samsung was able to keep the BOM to a minimum by keeping the number of components to a minimum.

The Coach 10 device, from Zoran, drives the main display and also handles all the data conversion for the secondary display. In essence, the IC is connected to the image sensor on one side and the LCD on the other side. In between is the interface to the flash memory. The part corrects for image stabilization, lighting, and barrel effect, both in still mode and high-definition video mode.

Zoran claims to offer more than just the silicon. They provide many of the necessary algorithms, and even a reference platform that's pretty close to everything an OEM needs to go to market with a finished product. The Coach 10 also appears in Cisco's Flip UltraHD digital camcorder, which we took apart a few months ago.Note that Zoran has since released the next two devices in the Coach family, the 11 and 12. Those parts add features like face tracking, blur correction, noise reduction, and real-time lens distortion compensation.