On Sat, 20 Jul 2013, Charlie+ wrote:

On Fri, 19 Jul 2013 21:49:35 -0700, isw wrote as
underneath my scribble :

In article ,
Amanda Riphnykhazova wrote:

Thanks Isaac for that very full reply. It seems possible to buy these cameras
for parts very inexpensively on ebay at the moment and with August
approaching, prices will go even lower. How difficult is it to switch out the
whole lens assembly mechanism itself like Nikon would do if they did the
repair?

I don't know about Nikons. The Panasonics I've opened up have been
excellently engineered, with clever assembly needing nearly no screws,
plus connectors everywhere so no soldering is necessary. I've opened one
each HP and Olympus, and they were both POS messes of spaghetti wiring
inside. Everything was connected with flying wires (no cables, flat or
otherwise) and screws everywhere -- except for where pairs of boards
were actually soldered together. Impossible to work on, nearly, and if
you tried, you'd have to make a complete record as you took it apart, to
be reasonably sure of getting all the wires properly connected again.

On the Panasonics, the complete lens assembly is attached with three or
four screws, and two flat cables connect everything up. It's a drop-in;
no alignment is necessary.

Thanks for posting that useful info, Ill look more closely at Panasonic
when next after a camera! Just to add info for others I broke the
screen on a Pentax Optio 5i compact (very small) and it was for the bin,
so i took it apart - a nightmare once inside and I would say quite
impossible to repair anything to do with the lens system (tiny
beautifully made plastic click together parts with absolutely no
provision for reversing assembly!) without spending hours and hours and
with no guarantee of success! Also really buried inside was a tiny NiCd
soldered in rechargable cell which was leaking - so these cameras have
a time limited life anyway! This Pentax was 5/6 years old - the bin was
definitely the right way to go!
C+

That's the advantage of junk equipment, you can learn from them. Since
they don't work, it doesnt' matter if you damage then, but yo might get it
going. But trying it on something yo don't care about yo may learn that
it's not worth the effort on a good item.

I dragged home an LCD monitor a couple of years ago, and when I plugged it
in, it turne dout the screen had been cracked. So I stripped it down, and
in doing so saw how accessible most of the electronics were. That
prepared me for the next one I found, which did work, but reset
sporadically (bad capacitors in the power supply). The LCD monitors are
so easy to work on compared to CRT monitors or tv sets, the boards are
small, and easy to access and remove, and everything is pretty available
with the power on. The lack of high voltage for the CRT helps, too.

As for the other batteries in digital cameras, that seems common. The
flash on mine keeps turning on, when I keep turning it off, and that
reminded me that it has some button cells accessible from the battery
compartment, to keep something, presumably the settings, alive when the
main batteries aren't in. I think a previous digital camera had some
button cells too.


Michael