You've probably seen it in your local CVS drugstore. Their brand new disposable digital camcorders they sell for about $30, lets you film your own 20 minute movie. You drop it off at CVS and they burn the recorded video onto a DVD. Rather ingenious considering how successful their previous disposable digital camera was.

However, wasting that kind of money over and over again sure isn't too efficient. How does making one of these digital camcorders re-usable and getting the videos out of these recorders yourself sound? Yup, sounds pretty good to us and we've got the pictures and steps showing you how. Let's get started...

On GT IRC, x24 and snow_veil were pointing out the new disposible camcorder that CVS was going to start carrying soon. After about a month passed and they finally started showing up in stores. Way my luck ran on this one was, there was no CVS within 200 miles of my house. So I e-mailed CVS and asked if they were going to put it in there online store. No dice. So I got x24 to buy one and snail mail it to me. Here's what arrived:

Here is the view of the back of the camcorder. It has four screws total that hold the back plate on and a few clips to help hold it into place. Two screws are in the top two corners under the glued on lable. Another one is just to the left of the power button and the last one is just to the right of the speaker. Pull down on the battery case until you hear a crack sound (almost like you snapped a piece of plastic), remove the cover and batteries.

Above is the cover removed and at this point all that is holding the camcorder in the casing is two small screws. Below, I just flipped over the board after taking out the last two screws.

Flip the camcorder around and we have a pic of the maintanance port that CVS uses to pull the videos off the camera.Below is a dark pic of the same port before I took the camcorder apart.

I am looking at adding the USB plug that is in the above pic if there is space. Let's see what we can do.