Digital camera’s are not meant to be taken apart and fixed.

Don't ask..............Ah I'll tell ya anyway.

I've got a Kodak Easyshare M883 that I commandeered from the wife when she got her digital 35mm Cannon. I use it in the shop for the pictures I post on the internet and for my web site. Well the camera seems to be acting up. The auto focus doesn't seem to be working right in the close up mode, 0-28" focal distance. It keeps giving me a warning it's not focused. So on go the magnifying glasses and I start checking the front to see if there's any dirt. Didn't find any, but..................but there are three little holes near the lens that look like they might be used for the focusing light or ultra sound ranging for the focus.

So I looked the camera over and find many tiny screws hold it together. Yup, you guessed it. Out they came.

I figure if I could get to the front of the camera that I could clean the range finder, if there was something there, and see if it would make a difference. After about taking off two layers of "stuff" I noticed that the wires could not be easliy removed. They were all soldered on.

With several layers still to go I figured no sense. They made these so you can't fix them. Ok........time to put it all back together. Now I had about a dozen or so screws laying in front of me. Different lengths and two different size threads. One thread for plastic, you know the ones with the course thread, and the other, a machine type thread. Almost together and I notice I've got more screws left than holes to put them in.

So to shorten this story up I did get all the screws back in where they belong and the camera is working, but not correctly in the mode I'd like to use the camera in.
I'm not looking for advice on what camera to buy. I just thought this would be good little story to relate to people who like to repair things at home. Sometimes you just need to look for the next best thing and that would be a new 35mm camera in the future.

The future being anywhere from tomorrow to a year or so from now.

Also depends on how mad I get at the camera, it might just meet the wall traveling at a high rate of speed. There "focus now, you somebeach".

Bernd