Help! My Digital Camera Makes a Funny Noise and the Lens Won’t Move
Update: Problem is resolved. Check out this post for details.
Back in December, I got my friend a Olympus FE-4020
The other day, she calls me up and says her camera is making a weird noise and it won’t turn on. I tell her to drop it off so I can look at it. Sure enough, it’s not working.
The camera appears to have turned on, and the lens won’t retract. It’s just stuck out in the open position. Since the lens isn’t working properly, the on/off button doesn’t do anything. If I pull the battery out and put it back in, the camera turns on, the Olympus logo appears on the LCD screen, and the lens attempts to retract. After a little whirring and buzzing, and no movement, it lets out an angry beep-ish sound and goes back to doing nothing.
Near as I can tell, the problem is that something broke in the lens assembly and/or motor. Someone else showed me a camera with a similar problem, and it that case it was clear the camera was dropped and the lens assembly bent, probably preventing it from properly retracting. In this case, there’s no evidence of a drop or dent. So who knows what happened…
The bottom line, though, is that the camera is out of operation and it will probably stay that way. The trouble with cheap consumer point-and-shoot cameras is that once they break, they’re not really worth paying to have them fixed. It only cost $90 to buy the camera, and it would likely cost that much or more to open the camera up and rebuild the assembly.
The good news is that the camera is still under warranty at Olympus. So, hopefully, I can ship it back and have them fix it for free. If not, I’ll be opening up the camera just to experiment and toy around.
Filed Under: Random Thoughts
Tagged: Olympus, Point and Shoot, repair
Comments
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hi, did you get this resolved? can you let me know, having the same problem
Hi Freya,
No solution yet. I got the original box with the warranty card back from my friend. I intend to ship it off to Olympus this week and see if they’ll cover it under the warranty and fix it. I’ll post an update here as soon as I have one…
@Freya, I finally did get it resolved. See my latest post for details, but in short Olympus fixed it under warranty. Not sure how much it would cost if your camera is out of warranty (1 year from purchase).