Disassembling the Canon Powershot A650 Digital Camera

Sample Pic !

What follows is my guide in words and pictures to taking this camera apart. Read it over before starting the disassembly.

Tools needed:

- Set of small screwdrivers. The screws have Philips heads. A thin flathead screwdriver is useful for prying apart the plastic latches in the camera.

- Can of compressed air.

Take off the filter adapter silver ring around the lens by pressing the button next to it. Look at the camera from every angle and take out all the screws you can find. You should come up with a system to track where each screw came from because the screws that you will remove have several types of threads and several lengths. For each screws or group of screws, I ripped a small piece of paper and wrote on it where the screws belong. I formed it into a "container" by creasing it with my thumbs and my index fingers. The problem is that halfway through, you don't know how to name the locations anymore. Probably the easiest thing is to print the images on this site and number the screw holes in the pictures as you remove each screw. This will also make sure you put all the screws back in when you re-assemble the camera.

Next, pry off the back half of the case. Notice it's held in place by three latches, so you have to raise the top a little:

This is how the back looks without the case:

and the front (without the lens assembly):

Next, remove the piece that has the shutter and the zoom controls. The main obstacle is the latch and the ribbon cable:

To remove the LCD, unscrew the two screws shown below and unplug the yellow and the blue connectors:

While you're at it, also remove the ribbon cable that you see in the corner next to the yellow and the blue connectors.

To remove the LCD, there's also this screw and one or two others:

Look at the metal case and remove the screws that hold it together. When you get the flash unit loose, short-circuit the capacitor to discharge it so you won't accidentally electrocute yourself. I used a pair of scissors WITH PLASTIC HANDLES. Touch the two points shown below to discharge the capacitor and to see a decent-sized spark in the process:

NOTE: This is the bad way to discharge a capacitor because it creates a very large current for a brief period of time, possibly destroying the capacitor. You're better off using a resistor to drain the capacitor over ten seconds or so.

Take out the screws that hold the viewfinder in place.

Now comes the fun part: disassembling the lens assembly. Start by taking off the little cover on top of the lens held by a spring if it hasn't fallen off already:

This should leave you with the following pieces held together by cables:

Slowly play with the back cover of the lens assembly. It's held together by a few latches so try not to break them. I broke one or two but I reassembled the lens assembly without any problems. The back cover snapped back into place.

Once you remove the back cover, a few gears will fall out that were connected to the little motor:

Taking apart the lens assembly is by far the trickiest and most painstaking part. The lens assembly is composed of a few plastic cylindrical pieces that have diagonal tracks to guide the other cylinders. When one of the cylinders reaches the end of the track, it pops off because the end of the track is open. Try to remember how every piece looked and fit in before you remove it. It will save you a lot of time and frustration.

Note, Piece 4 can be decomposed further.

Also, be very careful with the two ribbon cables that go into the lens assembly; I managed to break one of them at some point. I moved to another house while the camera was apart, so I stored everything in a few plastic bags and when I took them out two weeks later, one of these two ribbon cables was ripped.

It's also useful to have a can of compressed air to clean the lens of dust as you are reassembling it.

At the end of the process, you will have the following pieces:

As you see, I removed 37 screws to get to this point.

Here's my Crazy Glue job:

The plastic here doesn't work well with Crazy Glue. One solution is to go to CVS and among the instant glues they sell is a brand of glue that is packaged together with a tube of primer. The primer made the plastic surfaces hold together much better.

Okay, time to re-assemble everything! I'll refer to the cylindrical parts of the lens numbered in red in the previous pictures. The green line shows the ring edge of Piece 4. Rotate the ring until the opening in the ring lines up with the opening of the track in Piece 3. Place Piece 5 inside Piece 6 and rotate them until Piece 5 slips in. Take the combined piece and place it so that the pins from Piece 5 slips through the openings in the ring of Piece 4 and the openings in Piece 3. Push Piece 6 down so that its pins slip through the openings of Piece 2. Here's how it looks:

Rotate all the pieces back into place so the lens assembly shrinks into the retracted position.

Place the three gears inside and snap the back into place. To complete the lens, put the cover with the spring back in place--without permanently deforming the spring. Now go the steps in reverse order to re-assemble the camera.

Good luck!

How To Replace a Broken LCD Canon Powershot SD400

So, I abused the hell out of my camera. It rode in my back pocket as I stumbled through the last few months and I ended up smashing the screen on my Canon SD400 (sometimes known as the IXUS 50.) It was not the camera it once was. Note the dents, scratches and the fact that all the coloring around the optics is gone. Despite broken screen, I’m pretty happy with the amount of abuse it absorbed. The camera still worked and took pictures despite not having a working screen, but the optical viewfinder was all clogged with dirt and I was attempting to navigate the menus from memory and without feedback. It sucked.

This was sad, so I started googling for the possibility of a user replaceable screen and while what I found certainly voids the warranty faster than throwing the camera under the wheels of a moving van, it worked. Nuts to you warranty.Andy Ozment has a nice (if google adword covered) multi-model write-up about repairing the screens, but no pictures. I *guess* this is an understandable side-effect of writing a guide on repairing a camera, many people might find it tough to photograph the repair while trying to repair the object that would be used to take photographs. I am not one of those people. Oh, now is as good a time as any I guess:

Perform at your own risk. This shit WILL void your warranty, oh god don’t sue me

Here we go.
I got a new screen from Foto Geeks it came in a silly little box and seemed tiny for costing 65bux.

From reading on the internet I took a guess that my backlight was *NOT* broken, the chief indicator of its well being was the glow it gave off through the shattered screen, this is good. I don’t know where you can order a new backlight, but I’m pretty sure you could replace it in nearly the same method I use here

I used two Craftsman Professional screwdrivers, a flat head 3/32×2-1/2, and a philips 00×2-1/2. I love these screwdrivers ’cause I’m pretty sure you could prison stab someone with them and my Dad gave them to me. (thanks Dad)

You’ll also need Scotch Tape, a Post-it note and scissors.

First, remove the battery and memory card, I guess you should also be worried about static discharge frying the camera, but I did this repair whilst wearing socks on the carpet, I think you’ll be fine. I’m fairly sure that static electricity doesn’t really exist.
Here’s the unboxed replacement SD400 LCD screen. I tried to keep the new screen as dust free as possible so as not to trap any crud under it during installation. Determining the orientation is going to be important later, so notice that the screen has two distinct sides.

There are six screws on the exterior of the camera, REMOVE THEM!

When all the screws are out, pull the two overlapping halves of the camera apart, being careful as it is possible to bend the metal.

Parts that will fall out:
Silvery plastic circle thing.
Rectangular silver mount for the wrist strap
Buttons

I did a powerup here to check that I hadn’t messed anything up at this point, and ’cause I didn’t have a picture of the screen in all it’s glory.This may have been a shock risk or just stupid, I don’t know.

At this point I installed an InvisibleSHIELD on the new screen while it was still outside the camera

Removal of screw number 7, this screw is a different size than the others, so don’t get it mixed up.

This is one of the hardest parts of the whole procedure. The backlight and LCD are held together with a series of metal clips that have to be freed before you can replace the screen. I used a small flat head screwdriver to wedge in between the two and try to get the claps undone. This is also the part I have the worst pictures of. The goal is not to get the LCD off right now; it’s just to get it detached from the backlight.

When it comes loose, you’re going to want to slide it to the left before you lift it up like the pictures shows. There’s a few little catches that you don’t want to break off, but sliding the screen out a little bit before lifting should avoid this.

Flip the camera over and using the screwdriver, lift up the small black plastic gate holding the ribbon cable in, and pull it out.

Now comes the really unpleasant part. The ribbon cable is threaded through the internals of the camera, if you pull it free, it’ll be very hard to get the new cable back through. That’s where the tape and Post-its come in; you can use them to make yourself a little retrieval cable and pull both the ribbon cable and the post-it through. You can then use that same bit of paper to guide the new ribbon back through.Make sure that the new screen is going on in the same orientation as the old one; there likely won’t be room to turn the ribbon over when you get it threaded.

Here’s the old screen with retrieval post-it attached and ready to go

Now the old screen, ribbon, and post-it have been pulled through.

Transfer of the post-it from the old screen to the new one, with the new screen in the correct orientation

Threading of the new ribbon through the cameras internals, this would be quite hard without the post-it already in place as the path inside the camera goes up and down. Also consider applying tape to both sides of the ribbon/post-it interface to make sure nothing gets snagged inside the camera.

When you have the ribbon cable back through, reseat it very deeply into the channel and lock the gate back down. Then give the camera a power on:

Counter-Terrorists WIN!

Put it back together and do a little dance, that wasn’t so bad.