We here at iFixit are very fond of cameras. It is our pleasure to provide our fans with what we believe will be an amazing teardown. Without any further ado, we present the D5100 teardown.

The first thing we noticed about the D5100 was that the body was nowhere near the same heft as our standard workhorse camera, the D90. It just felt... punier.

And then we took some photos with it.

The photos came out amazing. The colors were crisp, and we could even get away with usable (albeit super-grainy) ISO 6400 shots, which is certainly not the case with the D90's ISO 3200.

For those who need a brush up on the definition of ISO, click here.

The flippy rotating screen is very useful -- especially if you're trying to record yourself for YouTube.

Unlike the D90, the top of the camera does not include an informational LCD. Instead, we get the rotating mode selector on the right.

The specs:

• 16.2 MP DX-format CMOS sensor
• 4 FPS continuous shooting
• 3.0 inch, 921,000-dot display
• 1920x1080 recording at up to 30 FPS
• 11-point AF (auto-focus) system

First thing's first: take out the battery. We don't want any electric juice running through the D5100's veins while we're taking it apart.

• Especially not to the large-and-in-charge 330µF flash capacitor.

The 7.4 V 1030 mAh EN-EL14 Li-ion battery is used by the D5100, D3100, and the COOLPIX P700. Sadly, it's not compatible with other cameras in the Nikon lineup, such as the D90 and D7000.

The camera has roughly 4 billion screws holding it together. We'll be skipping a lot of the "unscrewing this screw" pictures (like the ones shown in this step) in order to keep the teardown interesting.

Trust us, after the 50th screw, it gets boring.

As if exposed screws weren't enough, Nikon also chose to hide screws underneath covers and the rubberized thumb grip.

After a good twenty #00 Phillips screws were removed from the perimeter of the device, we managed to separate the rear cover.

A ribbon cable for the rear control buttons and a hefty 40 pin cable responsible for transmitting information to the rear display still attached the rear cover to the rest of the camera.

Fun fact: to eliminate the complexities of a slip ring on the rotating rear display, its motion is limited to 180 degrees.

After removing a couple more screws, the protective steel shield was removed from the motherboard.

Then we had the pleasure of disconnecting nine cables (not all can be seen) and de-soldering a few wires; finally, the motherboard was lifted out of its home.

Front view of the motherboard. (High-res version of the motherboard, click here):

• Nikon EXPEED 2 EI-154 1051 Z05 image processor
• Samsung K4T1G164QF-BCE7 1Gb DDR2-800 SDRAM (total of 3 Gb = 384 MB)
• MXIC MX29GL128EHXFI-90G 128 Mb parallel flash memory

Rear view of the motherboard. (High-res version, click here):

• Toshiba TMP19A44FEXBG low-power microcontroller
• Nikon EI-155 M4L1BA00 00151044
• Nikon NHHS-2 049M8

After much time spent hunting around to figure out how the front cover was attached, we decided to peel off the rubber grip beneath the shutter button.

And we found the answer. To remove the front cover, a bunch more creatively-placed screws had to be removed.