Cockeyed.com is a peculiar site. It is spattered with links in an almost unintelligible manner, but if you dig hard enough, or just click randomly, you can find some pretty fun stuff. One nice writeup they’ve done is how to replace the lens in their point and shoot camera. This one happens to be a Canon Powershot sd750, but it will give you an idea about how difficult it can be for any point and shoot. The lens assembly couldn’t be replaced until almost every single piece had been disassembled. There are tons of pictures showing the process and the final result. Though the install was a success, his replacement lens was already beat up pretty bad. Looks like he’ll have to go through it all again.
[via The Old New Thing]
“Discard. No! Wait. Keep that.”
Best quote from the article.
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.
been there done that :P
I also had to change the LCD.
My sony camera has been through a lot of suffering.
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.
So for black LCD but zoom works reconnect cable. Where do you get the small tools ebay? And what are they called. And a Sony with a frozen shut lens no zoom action, but lcd screen works fine? Both Sony’s.
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.
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.
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.. :(
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!
wow, that looks risky
@fyrebug
I think that is so the capacitor doesn’t hurt anyone and they get sued.
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.
That should be “undo 1-4 screws”…
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
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
any pointers to that security feature on the sony firmware?
i’m thinking about swapping a good sony lens for a better carl zeiss one. as to improve picture quality without upgrading :)
Re post by kyle007
is your take apart guide and reassemble guide for DSC-w55 available on the net? I’ve got a w55 with cracked LCD, bought a new LCD but have problems with replacing it.
Could you drop me an email by any chance on p.wolowski@gmail.com?
Would be grateful for any help.
Though Shakespeare is great , he’ll never find d right words to describe u because he simply never experienced knowing a wonderful person like u, friend!
If there is another copy of the DSC-W55 guide, please could someone post a link?
My sony caught an ocean wave in the face when switched on, and now has lines all over the pictures. It takes movie fine though – a bit weird.
On the other hand, I could blunder my way through and create some sort of guide if it would help anyone else.