Hacker News Reader

Comment by fencepost | Hacker News Reader

They have an in-house repair shop that dealt with most or all of it, and they charge the customer for the cost of the repair. From the comments the fact that they don't gouge on repairs is one reason some folks use them.

View on HN

How do you fix a burnt cmos sensor? I feel like canon would charge you near enough the full replacement price.

I wish the blog post had talked more about that. I'm curious about their repair process. What capabilities do they have in house? Can they replace a broken sensor?

I know about 12 years ago I blew the firewire connection on my video camera (Canon xm2), and to fix it they would have to replace the full board.

So I feel like they don't make them repairable.

Yet with a heat gun its an easy fix.

It depends on their expertise

There are a lot of things that a professional repair shop focused on a particular type of equipment may be able to do that aren't practical for anyone else - including manufacturer repair facilities. Louis Rossman is a bit entertaining on this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ocF_hrr83Oc

They blog a lot about their repairs process in general. It's primarily mechanical damage to lenses they appear to normally deal in - the focusing rings, aperture mechanisms or realigning optical elements dislodged by drops and so on. An embedded CCD/CMOS sensor is probably a full logic board replacement I'd assume, as opposed to some kind of sensor only replacement, given it's almost always soldered on.

You fix it yourself, most likely using a sensor from another broken camera.

They might send that back to the manufacturer to fix.

In the Reddit thread, they talked about replacing the aperture module for some of the lenses; that's just a simple swap, along with cleaning the adjacent elements.

I'd imagine it's a fairly common replacement. I've seen event photographers do it quite a few times putting their cameras near lasers.

I'm only a reluctant amateur photographer, but my understanding is that damaged sensors cannot be repaired, and that manufacturers will quote repair costs totalling or exceeding the cost of an entirely new camera.

A quick search online reveals plenty of sources of replacement sensors, at a fraction of the cost of the complete camera.

There do seem to be people selling 7d mark ii cmos sensors for ~$300, while a new body would cost ~$1100.

Someone posted a video of replacing the sensor on the old 7d (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udonzfGdW0Y)

Seems it eventually worked for him, after several attempts to adjust the position to get correct focus, but if you read the comments on the video there are many people who've messed up their camera trying to do this.

Might be fun to try though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com