A description of Player-One Mars-C ll mono conversion 


As no mono version of the IMX 662 camera is yet available I decided to try and modify the colour version.
There are numerous online sources of helpful information mainly for SLR users who wish to perform 
this task, however very little for those of us with small BSI sensors.
The first job was to dismantle the camera which is very simple. The sensor cover slip will be the main 
difficulty as it is quite small and .55mm thick, extremely tough and cemented to the sensor surround. First try was using a Dremel and 20mm diamond disks to eat away at the edges, all this did was make a huge noise with no controllable results and tiny pieces of glass flying off.
Using a 30w soldering iron set at 400° it was slowly moved around the glass edge stopping for a few
seconds before moving on. This was repeated several times during about 30 mins without any sign of the bond changing colour or the sensor becoming too hot (I had placed a piece of the blue thermal putty under the sensor board just in case). Using the 30w soldering iron I was able to soften the excess bonding material outside of the glass and scrape it away exposing the narrow bond layer between the glass and the sensor surround. No amount of wedging pushing or swearing had any effect on the glass so the 80w was put into play. This iron has no thermal control so left on for some time it became extremely hot, covering the whole sensor glass a satisfying cracking was heard shortly afterwards. On inspection several small pieces became loose with a larger piece tilted up at an angle allowing it to be removed. Using the probe most of the rest was pried up and removed.
One small piece of glass had wedge itself between the wires but not broken any as that would have been the end. Using canned air and good luck it came loose and was removed. The next job was to protect the wires as removing the lenses and the CFA layer would mean the slightest slip was fatal.
This was accomplished by slowly dripping tiny amounts of super strong Araldite in the corners and 
 then tilting the camera so it slowly worked itself over the wires but not onto the sensor itself. This was quite difficult as the gap between the underside of the cover glass and the sensor is .5mm so 
some period of time is needed to allow the epoxy to flow, fast setting epoxy would not work.
At the beginning of day 3 when both ends of the sensor wires were safely covered in epoxy it was time to attack the sensor, the top layer is the lenses which surprisingly came away quite easily just 
using a sharpened plastic scraper (white in the tools image) which were further removed using a small trimmed paint brush and canned air. Then the fun began, the CFA layer is extremely hard and also very thin.Using an old Sony slr
sensor I had from another project no amount of rubbing, gentle scaping or application of various chemicals including
(metho, turps, acetone, isopropyl, shellite, oven cleaner, petrol, sulphuric acid) worked. The solution was to use the narrow sharpend end of the Dental probe to chip away at the CFA trying not to damage the light receiving surface above the photodiodes. This took many hours as the probe could only be used in one direction which meant rotating the sensor several times. At all times the camera was attached to a computer running Firecature or Sharpcap to check if anything had been done to destroy the sensor.
The next inspection revealed numerous tiny ridges over the entire sensor surface which were 
probably caused from the edges of the probe. These were partially removed by polishing with a 
tooth pick its end chisel cut and water diluted Maguires Perspex polish, this took several hours
but appears to have been a reasonable success.

Regards, Phil