I Win… sort of
By Matt | July 17, 2007, 5:09pm
Topics: General, Photos, Technology |
My camera (Kodak C300) broke… I turned it on this morning and it wouldn’t turn off. You might think thats not an issue, but it has an auto off feature which turns the camera off after a few minutes. To turn it back on you have to turn it off and turn it on. That didn’t work.
Warranty? None… it only had a one year warranty from date of purchase and I’ve had it for a year and 4 months. I’m not one to be defeated by technology. Since I wasn’t going to loose anything by breaking it further (if such a thing occurred), I decided for surgery! Yep, took my camera apart. And let me tell you, you never want to drop your digital camera (EVER)! Various internal components are small and plastic, so it should in theory be very easy to break your camera internally such that not even the manufacturer could fix it; it would be cheaper to buy a new one cause you would spend more on labor trying to fix it if the part was replaceable.
I discovered the issue was a toggle switch that controls the mode of the camera (Night, Auto, Off, Video). The switch is a neat concept (thumbs up), but horrible design (thumbs down). The toggle lever was getting stuck in the on position, thus it wouldn’t shut off or change modes. The lever is about as small as the thickness of a penny. Very hard to work with… not to mention fix.
So this tiny piece of plastic is virtually unrepairable if it breaks. It didn’t break, but was just getting stuck. I made the mistake of taking the toggle lever out, and that cost me like 30 minutes to put it back. It took lots of patience and a little ingenuity. I believe I put it in backwards, so now it doesn’t get stuck ON.
And after putting it all back together. The video mode doesn’t work. No big loss there, I still have picture mode, and thereby a working camera. Yay, go me, I win.
Here’s what I recovered off the memory card… 6:38 AM this morning:
