Mission: Break the TOUGHPIX DIGITHERM

If you wanted to destroy a camera, there are a few ways you’d go about it. Blast it with high pressure water jets, drop it on a hard surface or drive over it with a three-ton truck. You would expect it to be well and truly obliterated, and you’d be right if we were talking about a normal digital or smartphone camera. We tried this experiment on our brand new thermal and digital imaging camera, the TOUGHPIX DIGITHERM earlier this week. We took our own product and tried to destroy it in any which way we had. We had ultimate faith that by the end of the experiment, we’d still have a fully functional, working DIGITHERM camera. Otherwise, why would we have risked breaking our very own camera? The TOUGHPIX DIGITHERM comes with an IP54 rating, and this means it’s ingress protection certified. We wanted to test this certification and push it to extremes, maximise its capabilities and see how much hammering it could take. We started off lightly and blasted it with high pressure water jets to test how it handled moisture. Would it pass this first hurdle? We shook the excess water off the camera and pressed the power button. It switched on and everything worked like normal. This got us thinking. How else can we try to destroy this camera? We’d already blasted it with electricity’s worst nightmare. So, we decided to drop it from a height. Surely this would damage it. We asked the tallest member of staff to climb some step ladders and drop the camera from about 3 metres high onto a concrete path. Everyone held their breath as we collected it from the ground and checked it for life. You guessed it, it switched on again. We checked the outer case for any damage. Apart from a few small bits of gravel, it looked untouched. The body, made from aircraft aluminium, had saved it a from nasty fate. By this point we knew we had to take drastic measures to try and destroy this camera.

For more information on Mission: Break the TOUGHPIX DIGITHERM talk to CorDEX Instruments Ltd