“Discard. No! Wait. Keep that.”

Best quote from the article.

Posted at 3:33 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by Michael Witt

yeah, i did this for my sister’s nikon a while ago. takes forever to get apart, lots of tiny screws and very small flex pcb’s. It’s not really cost effective or an efficient use of time to replace the lens assembly unless you by chance have one sitting around. All of these digicams are pretty much disposable units when under $300 if some major piece like the lens assembly breaks.

Posted at 4:21 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by matt

been there done that :P

I also had to change the LCD.

My sony camera has been through a lot of suffering.

Posted at 4:43 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by Jerome

I’ve done this several times on a few different Canon cameras. A few notes that might be helpful:

If the screen shows full white like his, try reconnecting the screen ribbon cable.

If the screen shows black, the camera zooms, but doesnt take pictures, try reconnecting the image sensor ribbon cable.

If it grinds, you can try disassembling the actual lens and rebuilding that, I’ve had success with that sometimes.

And most importantly, STAY CLEAR OF THE CAP! I’ve accidentally set it off on 2 rebuilds. The first just died, the camera wouldnt work at all. The second one actually shocked me, causing me to tear the ribbon cable I was holding. Make sure you don’t touch the terminals with your skin or a screwdriver.

That said, replacing misc parts inside isnt all that hard. Most Canons are more or less the same idea inside, once you’ve taken one apart they’re all pretty similar.

Posted at 6:09 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by firebat45

I had to do this for a sony camera.

UNFORTUNETLY the second you open up many sony cams to replace the lens it trips a security feature in the firmware that disables the flash (not the memory, the camera flash)
there’s apparently a VERY round about way to get it going again, but in the end sometimes it’s not worth the time and part cost for a $100 camera.

Posted at 7:54 pm on Mar 9th, 2009 by fyrebug

Rob’s a cool guy, been reading his site for almost 10 years! Damn I’m getting old, I started in high school… Now he’s married, has kids, and still finds time to do some amazingly stupid, yet amazingly funny things.

Posted at 12:15 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by fuzzmanmatt

Nice. Is there something on replacing the lcd screen on the back of one of these point and shoots? Because today I found my lcd had cracked.. :(

Posted at 2:55 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by Dot

The LCD in my Canon Powershot S50 has recently died (everything else works and I can plug in a TV as a viewfinder, but the LCD just shows solid grey). I was also going to mention (like firebat45) that when the LCD ribbon cable is not plugged in properly the LCD is solid white, though, so that may be the problem here.

Replacing the LCD should be a much easier job than the lens assembly; the only difficulty is finding all the screws that hold the thing together in the first place!

Posted at 4:57 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by Ben Ryves

wow, that looks risky

Posted at 7:29 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by CaesarPalace

@fyrebug

I think that is so the capacitor doesn’t hurt anyone and they get sued.

Posted at 10:17 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by epicelite

dot, the screen is probably the easiest internal component to replace. It’s always on the outside, usually all you have to do is take off the casing, and under 1-4 scres on the screen, unplug it, and you’re done. A screen swap usually takes me less than 30 minutes, a lens swap like the article takes over 2 hours.

Posted at 10:22 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by firebat45

That should be “undo 1-4 screws”…

Posted at 10:24 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by firebat45

I was buying a sonys DSC-w55,through DSC-w120 on e-bay with cracked LCD’s and or Lends assemblies, and putting them back together, then gave them away as gifts and sold them as refurbished on e-bay, I road an old crappy wooden roller coaster and my camera was in my pocket the rickety ride cracked the LCD on my camera I was crushed… I found that other people had the same problem and new LCD’s were almost the price of a new point and shoot… so I started buying them broken AS IS for parts I bought 12 of them and repaired 6 er 8 of them I kept one gave a few away as gifts and sold the rest including the completely broken parts. There were many assemblies in side the camera there was a flash assembly, a lends, lcd and main mother board all parts were inter change able I still have a DSC-w120 I rebuilt and keep it on me daily…
I even made a take apart guide and reassemble guide for the DSC –w55, W70, and the W80

Posted at 10:28 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by kyle007

umm having same prob with dsc-w120 need to replace lcd but dont know wat to do after taking off casing, any help here would be nice, and this is alot harder then my sony psp repairs

Posted at 11:00 pm on May 2nd, 2009 by questiondude