Camera repairs

[88V8]

As of today I have two Olympus C5050Z needing repair.
The latest goes through the motions of taking pics, but as I found just now it does not record them to the XD card, nor to a replacement card, so our latest holiday pics never happened.

I realise they are not exactly state of the art, launched in 2002, but I am rather attached to these cameras and I do have another identical that works and another that is supposed to work, or at least it did when I bought it.

I would like to get the two duffers repaired. Any recommendations as to where?

V8

[servodude]

As of today I have two Olympus C5050Z needing repair.
The latest goes through the motions of taking pics, but as I found just now it does not record them to the XD card, nor to a replacement card, so our latest holiday pics never happened.

I realise they are not exactly state of the art, launched in 2002, but I am rather attached to these cameras and I do have another identical that works and another that is supposed to work, or at least it did when I bought it.

I would like to get the two duffers repaired. Any recommendations as to where?

V8

Before you do anything else have you (completely) ruled out the card as the issue?

2002 is a long time ago and the capabilities for all flash cards have changed massively since - with the problem that older equipment is often much more picky in what it will work with; even within xD there were 4 types before it was phased out so, unless you know that it previously worked, a replacement might not be as equivalent as you think.

I would expect the camera to have a format option for initialising the cards - and this should freshen them up for working; that would be the first thing I would try (and also plugging the cards in to a PC to see if they are read/writeable there)

Quick checking google (thankfully camera nerds are mad for the intertubes) throws up this resource https://www.wrotniak.net/photo/c/c5050-rev.html

The camera has two slots: one accepts Compact Flash Type I or II card, including the MicroDrive, of capacities up to 2GB (no FAT32 formatting, this is why not larger), while the other may host either a SmartMedia (up to 128MB) or the new, really tiny xD-Picture card (only cards up to 512 MB are supported, including the "M" and "H" series).

...other than that you might have to approach a dedicated forum for repair suggestions
so that narrows down what you expect to work - and gives the opportunity to drop a CF card in (don't laugh I saw one last week!)

[88V8]

As of today I have two Olympus C5050Z needing repair.
The latest goes through the motions of taking pics, but as I found just now it does not record them to the XD card, nor to a replacement card, so our latest holiday pics never happened.

Before you do anything else have you (completely) ruled out the card as the issue?

I would expect the camera to have a format option for initialising the cards - and this should freshen them up for working;
....and gives the opportunity to drop a CF card in (don't laugh I saw one last week!)

I have a CF card, one came with a camera I bought, but I don't think I have a reader....

Reformatting the XD cards... the cards have been with me since 2007 and I have never reformatted them. Every time I upload, I delete the pics so there seemed no point.
But yesterday I found the camera's mains power supply - I believe it's quite a hungry process - and reformatted all the cards and waddya know, now they work.
Super! Thankyou.

So now I have two cameras that work, one that might and one that doesn't. Perhaps for repair, my local camera shop might be a place to start.

V8

[servodude]

Before you do anything else have you (completely) ruled out the card as the issue?

I would expect the camera to have a format option for initialising the cards - and this should freshen them up for working;
....and gives the opportunity to drop a CF card in (don't laugh I saw one last week!)

I have a CF card, one came with a camera I bought, but I don't think I have a reader....

Reformatting the XD cards... the cards have been with me since 2007 and I have never reformatted them. Every time I upload, I delete the pics so there seemed no point.
But yesterday I found the camera's mains power supply - I believe it's quite a hungry process - and reformatted all the cards and waddya know, now they work.
Super! Thankyou.

So now I have two cameras that work, one that might and one that doesn't. Perhaps for repair, my local camera shop might be a place to start.

V8

Hey! Glad it worked.
FAT filesystems can get borked quite easily - especially on battery powered devices with removable media
thankfully they respond quite well to recovery apps like recuva if one does eventually destroy the allocation table
- fundamentally though this table (the FAT) gets modified every time you add or delete a file, which means the part of the flash chip it is on goes through exponentially more write/erase cycles than any other and does eventually wear out (becoming unreliable)