I'm afraid we are going to have to face the fact that not everything is
economically repairable. The bottom line is that in many cases, it costs
much less (in labor and materials) to make a new camera (or whatever) than
to repair an old one. This is not a malicious practice of evil business,
it's just a fact of life.

Back in 1950, when radio repair was in its heyday, the people who assembled
radios at the factory used the same techniques as the repairman (soldering
irons, pliers, screwdrivers, etc.). Repair was easy because manufacturing
was not automated -- it used the same hand-tool techniques.

In 1975, in the printed-circuit-board era, assembly was automated but hand
repair was still relatively easy. Most of the individual components hadn't
changed much since the hand-tool era.

Today we're dealing with custom ICs (which you can't repair inside of) and
extremely dense surface-mount circuit boards with tiny, unidentifiable
components. Repair is difficult.

Admittedly, we all feel sad when we encounter things that could have been
repairable and aren't, but...

Should a customer choose a $400 camera that is repairable over a $100 camera
(with equal performance) that is not? I don't think so.

And I certainly don't want the repair industry ganging up on the
manufacturers and forcing them to do away with the $100 non-repairable
camera, forcing everybody to pay the higher price.

In my opinion, the repair industry got spoiled in the 1950s, when everybody
had primitive TV sets that ate vacuum tubes at the rate of one every three
or four weeks. Nowadays, a TV lasts maybe 8 years without repair, and when
it fails, the cause of the failure is usually hard to find. This tells me
that all the components are much more reliable, and they are also much
better matched (to last the same length of time). This is supposed to be
worse? Sorry -- when I indulge in nostalgia, I don't go *that* far.