Right in the middle of my
house renovation,
about the worst possible time it could
have chosen to do so, my long-time-trusty Canon G9 decided to brick
itself. No power-up, dead, fresh battery didn't help. Oh noez!!
I limped through the next few days on a
cellphone
and then a couple of borrowed cameras from friends [which is how most of
these pictures were taken], but really wondered what on earth could have
made my faithful photographic companion go suddenly and completely tango
uniform.
A little research on the net turned up that many of these particular cameras had an issue where one or two internal screws would loosen up and eventually tumble around inside the case next to the electronics, randomly shorting things out and at a minimum blowing the main power fuse. This thread gets into some of the details, but unfortunately its link to a better description doesn't work anymore and that's one incentive for creating this page. I found that someone else had a fairly good picture of the issue as they discovered it. Most other references about the problem seem to lead back to one or more of these links. No comment or acknowledgement from Canon can be found, of course. So I just had to get in there and see if the same thing had happened to mine. There was no audible rattling to be heard, but some of the spaces inside this thing are pretty small so there's not a lot of wiggle room even for a small part. [Small images link to larger, more detailed versions.] |
Mind you, this camera doesn't owe me a dime. I got it in early '08,
wrote at length about some of its finer
operational points, and have put it through hell. It's roadtripped
with me, hiked and climbed with me, crawled under cars to capture those
detailed
service procedures, gone with me from frigid New England winters to 120F
desert heat, and always captured just what I wanted when I didn't bugger
up the shot myself. Most of the paint is worn off the zoom rocker and the
parameter wheel on the back needed at least one round of getting a little
touch of silicone lube under it so it would continue to spin freely.
|
After separating the top cover and removing the display screen and control block, we get down to the level where the main processor sits. |
A small amount of detective work pinpointed the tiny white SMT chip with the single "R" on it as the offending blown fuse, clearly in line from the power connector to the rest of the electronics, and in contrast to the "R00" zero-ohm jumpers nearby it tested as open. If its marking system is similar to that used by Tyco/Raychem in their 2410 fast-acting line of SMT fuses, this one could have a rating as high as 8 amps -- which might seem rather overspecified for a camera, but let's consider that these can draw on the order of an amp and a half with all the electronics powered up in shooting mode, with the display bright and zooming and focusing all at the same time. There's a reason they can get warm after a little while. The main safety purpose is to protect against lithium battery shorts. |
At this point I called Canon to ask about options. I was candid about the
fact that the camera was now in pieces all over my workbench, as it was
way out of warranty, and that I'd confirmed the same known issue with it.
They quoted a flat $139 to repair, which frankly is probably about what they
think the camera is worth by now -- where in some number of hopeless cases
they'd have to simply send back a full replacement. They also mentioned
some sort of "loyalty" sales/exchange discount for upgraded models, which
got me thinking that I'd read about the further evolution of the "G" line up
to the G12 and had seen many favorable comments on it and that maybe, four+
years down the road, a step up might be nice.
The G9 hit the market near the peak of the "megapixel wars" -- at 12 Mp it was on the leading edge of the time especially for a point-n-shoot form factor, but with the attendant downside that a small sensor so packed with pixels is inherently rather noisy. Anything taken above 200 ISO was pretty much unusably grainy and/or blotchy, even after various post-treatment. No noise filter could really deal with the odd but characteristic blue/yellow patchiness that often appeared in low-detail areas. I adapted by simply keeping the ISO down and recognizing the limitations of slower shutter speeds. Despite that I utilized the camera's unusually tall 6x optical zoom to the fullest and shot my share of shows from the back of the room in whatever lighting they had, resulting in quite a few nice presentations/reviews of same for the people involved. They loved that, said it was better than a lot of "professional" jobs they'd seen. It was therefore interesting that later G-series models, after peaking at 15 Mp but having its higher ISO settings dismissed as "pointless" due to the noise levels, had sensibly stepped *back* on the megapixel count. Canon surprised the market a bit by reducing the sensor to 10Mp for the rest of the line and working on improving the sensor sensitivity and surrounding optics. I used to wonder where was the threshold of pixel count that would competently rival most film, and determined that it was somewhere around 8 - 10 Mp for typical photographic uses. So 10Mp was clearly "enough" even when taking partial crops of JPEGs, and came with compelling image-quality advantages over its higher-count predecessors. The G12 also fell under Canon's "loyalty" sales program and they were able to offer me a factory-refurb [read: basically new in box] at a price slightly *under* ballpark at Amazon -- which has really become the de facto "get it for cheap" benchmark, hasn't it. As the refurbs are basically retail overstock and a tiny fraction of the cameras come from actual end-customer returns or defectives, I knew this would basically get me a new unit. They would also send a prepaid UPS label to ship back the old G9 for proper recycling. I warned them that it would likely come as a bag of loose parts, and they said they'd be perfectly okay with that. It didn't take long to make the decision, and I went for the upgrade. |
Working under the binocular microscope and trying to be as steady as possible still yielded a butt-ugly bridging job, but would likely work well enough for the moment. The special constructed tip extension I usually use for the Prius MFD fixes didn't get quite hot enough to flow solder on the larger areas of copper here, so it was back to the ordinary fine tip which still felt like trying to make jewelry with a sledgehammer. |
Time out for sort of an art shot: one of the chips on the main board has a completely clear case, and shows an intriguing landscape under the 'scope. |
So at this point I had high hope that nothing other than the fuse was
borked, and I'd be able to at least get the camera up and limping again.
Naturally there would be a nonzero chance that something else more
sensitive got damaged in the process of the loose screws shorting things
out, but it was
worth a try just for geek value. This would require putting most of the
unit back together as all these boards and their flexible extensions and
connectors are sort of one interdependent
system. In particular, several parts would have to get connected up just
to have the power buttons on the top panel able to tell the power board to
try and fire up.
Alas, other impediments arose that prevented ever having that little moment of glory. |
As long as everything was opened up, though, I also wanted to track down the zoom-lever return spring that had plagued me through the years. This damn thing broke *three* times in the course of my ownership, leaving the zoom rocker still functional but floppy and generally needing the touchy step of re-centering it manually. The first time it went the camera got sent back to Ritz who made it work again but completely screwed up the repair or used the wrong spring or re-bent the remains of the original one, or something -- it felt much stiffer than before and broke again within a couple of months. It then got sent off to Canon who fixed it "right" but due to perhaps an inherently poor design, it broke for its third and last time while I was lining up an external shot of Scotty's Castle in Death Valley. From that point forward I decided to just bloody live with it, or at least make trying to fix it again a very low priority. |
Hopefully the later G-series models have addressed these issues, because
for the moment I'm sticking with that because I enjoy the image quality and
full-manual-control user interface they've built into a nice compact unit.
Unlike some of the other forum posters who were saying things like "Screw
this, I'm buying Nikon." ... Maybe next time. Canon in fact did mess this
whole transaction up a bit, first sending a G12 that couldn't remember its
date and time across power-ups and I had to return *that* for another round
of exchange, and they almost lost the whole order in the process.
They finally got their shit together and the second G12 has been in my hands for a few days now so far doing quite well. What's especially nice is the additional finger wheel on the front of the case in addition to the usual wheel on the back, giving direct and simultaneous adjustment of shutter and aperture without having to swap parameters with a button. That alone gives a more "professional feel" to the whole shooting experience, essentially placing DOF and brightness control right into muscle memory. |