From phones to gaming handhelds.
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Dbrand just sued a rival casemaker for copying its “Teardown” skins that let you see under the back cover of your phone, laptop, or handheld gaming machine.
It’s also — purely coincidentally, I’m sure! — announcing a brand-new set of skins that take the idea even farther. No, I don’t mean “further”; I’m talking about going literally millimeters deeper into a device’s components with a 450-kilovolt X-ray, showing details you can’t get just by photographing a gadget with its back cover off.
And D-Brand’s new X-Ray skins aren’t just for a few iPhones and Samsung Galaxys, either. The company has X-rayed 125 different devices including Dell XPS, Razer Blade and Framework laptops, Microsoft Surface Pros, the Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch, Sony PS5, Xbox Series X and S, and the Lenovo Legion Go handheld.
Dbrand CEO Adam Ijaz tells The Verge they’re captured by a lab called Haven Metrology at 50-micron resolution:
The machine is a custom-built 450 kilovolt unit that uses a 431.8mm detector, able to capture details at a 50 micron resolution. For context, the next best source is about 120 microns (i.e. 240% lower resolution). This pairing of a large detector and high fidelity resolution allows us to get extraordinary detail in an uninterrupted scan – no need for parallax stitching. There are technically a handful of companies (military defense & space exploration) who have similar hardware, but even they go to Haven when they need a more advanced solution. Rough cost is about US$1.5M for the build.
dbrand holds an exclusive license with Haven Metrology for the use of digital X-Ray imaging in the production of hardware accessories (e.g. phone cases, skins). Unless [redacted military defense contractor] wants to start making X-Ray cases, no one else has access to this tech for our purposes.
I’ve definitely heard of 50-micron scanning before, but perhaps there’s something to the “uninterrupted scan” part. I’m looking forward to checking out the final print quality.
That’s something I’ll be doing on my own dime, by the way, because Dbrand finally got me! I’m not a skin guy — heck, I tend to be a naked phone guy — and I’ve resisted the company’s most nostalgia-inducing efforts before. But I’m also an X-ray guy, and a transparent gadget guy, and so… I’ve already ordered a skin for my definitely-not-small Z Flip 5.
Oh yes, nearly forgot to mention: The X-Ray skins give you both “Dark” and “Light” versions for a limited time so you don’t have to choose — which is good, because depending on how much is going on inside any given gadget, one of those two often looks a bit better IMO. The price works out to somewhere between $25 and $50 before you add tax and shipping.
Disclosure: The Verge recently collaborated with Dbrand on a series of skins and cases.
