Forum > General discussions > General > Sony Ericsson testing lab (Part III)

Welcome to part III of our tour of Sony Ericsson USA's testing labs. This final part of the tour wraps up a few odds and ends and shows you how the handsets are tested for signal reception performance and camera functions.

But first up, one of those odds and ends I mentioned. The two photos below show how Sony Ericsson makes sure that the parts being supplied to them are within the acceptable tolerances of the designs that are supplied to the manufacturing plants. Below you see a Mistral Coordinate Measuring Machine mated to a Hymarc Laser Scanner doing a very fine grain scan of the inside metal faceplate of a T61z. The device determines the dimensions of the sample and then compares it against a CAD solid file.

The entire process takes about 30 minutes.

A Sony Ericsson engineer devised this little contraption to measure the accuracy of a phone's battery gauge.

It works like this. A handset is placed in the vise with a camera position over the phone's display. A mechanical finger of sorts is positioned over top of one of the buttons on the keypad, so that it can periodically press a button to bring the display out of its sleep mode. Once the display is active, the previously mentioned camera takes a photo of the display.

Then the cool part happens. Software in the device looks at the photo of the phone's display and determines the state of the battery strength indicator. It then compares the status indicated by the battery icon with the real state of the battery, as determined through the electrical contacts that connect to the phone itself. That connection is obscured in this photo by the top half of the S710a, since the phone is in the open position.

Now onto the photographic aspects of the tour. Below you'll find a photo of a few VGA camera modules, such as those used in the K700i and the new Z500a. The coin in the photo, an American dime, is about 18mm in diameter. The round, gear-shaped part of the camera module that contains the lens is about 7mm in diameter.

Quite frankly, this room is creepy. And while those dolls do scare me, I would imagine they do a fair job of showing how accurate a camera is in photographing a scene, especially since the engineers can use a number of different kinds of light to illuminate the scene. Those range from typical indoor incandescent lighting, to fluorescent lighting, to light that is a reasonable approximation of daylight. Outside of the labs, the SE engineers also conduct real world field tests in varied situations to make sure the cameras perform as expected.

This last page of the story gives you a glimpse at the monster of a device that is used to test the reception characteristics of a handset. While I don't have a good photo of the entire testing chamber to show you, I can describe it a bit.

It is a long metal clad chamber that narrows at one end. It is about 2m x 2m (8' x 8') at one end, and about .5m x .5m at the other end (2' x 2'), with the entire device being about 7.5m (30') in length. The inside walls of the chamber are lined with a special, coated foam material that controls the reflections of the signals transmitted inside it.

In the first photo below you can see a mannequin head with a Z500a strapped to it. The head itself is mounted to a rotating mechanism that turns through the course of the test so that readings can be made from different positions. The cone in the photo is a transmitter, and there is a receiver located at the far end of the chamber, as shown in the second photo.

The last photo is just a closeup of the foam material that lines the walls of the chamber. This particular shot is of the door that you use to get into the chamber when setting it up. It is sized 1280x1024 so that it can be used as a background image on your desktop, if you so choose.