Today is a day of confessions. I just wrote a piece about repairing cameras, using a recent camera I had just acquired. In that story I pointed out I accepted the challenges you face when trying to get cameras to work when others have discarded them.
Well this is a second “problem” camera. If I hadn’t been given it for free I would be more upset, because it seems past repairable.
When you fire up this FujiFilm Finepix S2980 it asks you try turning it off and on again. The zoom lens makes little stutter steps, trying to extend itself to operating position. That is it…it just keeps repeating and failing. It doesn’t help the battery catch is dicey and the four AA batteries keep ejecting.
In desperation I looked to YouTube for a possible repair video. That was a real treat! In the first video I opened a rather frazzled man started by stating you shouldn’t try repairing the camera. He insisted you should take it to a repair person and not try to disassemble the camera yourself. This was a eight minute video, so of course I had to see what happened next.
I guess I should of been suspicious of any camera repair person, even amateur ones, who have a single jeweler’s screwdriver and two automotive size needle nose pliers.
The video started reasonably enough with the man opening the battery compartment to find four leaking batteries that had messed up the battery contacts.
He immediately decided to get to the bottom end of the battery compartment by taking the camera apart. After removing all the screws he pried the camera’s back off and immediately noticed he had torn the ribbon cable to the camera’s display screen. At that point he decided the camera was hopelessly broken.
But that didn’t stop him…he decided to simply tear the camera apart. You might be surprised by some of the larger parts he ended up with. The entire top comes off as a single piece with a large flash capacitor sticking out. He pointed it out as a battery. I was horrified as he poked at it with his bare finger, waiting for the 250V to blow him over.
He pulled the entire lens assembly out. Since that was the part I was having trouble with I was thrilled to see it is a subassembly that might come apart from the back and not the front—but that is my problem not his.
The man found the bottom of the battery compartment is a solid box that wouldn’t have allowed him access to clean the battery contacts. We both learned something, and my still intact camera is going to go onto the pile of hopeless cameras while his is going to the dump.
Well this is a second “problem” camera. If I hadn’t been given it for free I would be more upset, because it seems past repairable.
In desperation I looked to YouTube for a possible repair video. That was a real treat! In the first video I opened a rather frazzled man started by stating you shouldn’t try repairing the camera. He insisted you should take it to a repair person and not try to disassemble the camera yourself. This was a eight minute video, so of course I had to see what happened next.
I guess I should of been suspicious of any camera repair person, even amateur ones, who have a single jeweler’s screwdriver and two automotive size needle nose pliers.
The video started reasonably enough with the man opening the battery compartment to find four leaking batteries that had messed up the battery contacts.
He immediately decided to get to the bottom end of the battery compartment by taking the camera apart. After removing all the screws he pried the camera’s back off and immediately noticed he had torn the ribbon cable to the camera’s display screen. At that point he decided the camera was hopelessly broken.
But that didn’t stop him…he decided to simply tear the camera apart. You might be surprised by some of the larger parts he ended up with. The entire top comes off as a single piece with a large flash capacitor sticking out. He pointed it out as a battery. I was horrified as he poked at it with his bare finger, waiting for the 250V to blow him over.
He pulled the entire lens assembly out. Since that was the part I was having trouble with I was thrilled to see it is a subassembly that might come apart from the back and not the front—but that is my problem not his.
The man found the bottom of the battery compartment is a solid box that wouldn’t have allowed him access to clean the battery contacts. We both learned something, and my still intact camera is going to go onto the pile of hopeless cameras while his is going to the dump.
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