Disassembling a Cyber-shot DSC-P7

My piece-of-crap, six years old, 3.2 megapixel Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P7 digital camera has finally crapped out on me.

It’s four in the morning and I’ve just spent about two hours prying the camera apart, trying to figure out why the lens will no longer extend out when the camera is powered on.

After electrocuting myself (ah… so thats why they have non-conductive film wrapped around that area) and fumbling with the gears that extended the lens, I still couldn’t figure out why the damn thing is broken. The motor’s working but the gears won’t spin — even though the teeth on the gears appears to be in working order.

There’s a guy selling two of the gears on eBay for ten bones, as these particular lines of Cyber-shots are prone to lenses being stuck in the housing due to gears breaking (a frequent solution touted by people from Googling is dropping or banging the camera against the floor — no joke).

I can buy the replacement gears and see if it’ll do the trick, but I might just be wasting additional time and money — after all, there’s no guaranteed the new gears will fix the problem.

You’ve probably been in this situation before. Your old “good enough” piece of crap that you’ve been using for years finally broke down, and you have to make the decision to either repair it or replace it. It gets especially annoying when the part is easily replaceable, but is costly due to rarity or time consuming due to the part’s location.

Now, I can easily buy another “good enough” digital camera for around $50-$80 bucks. The gears that may fix my old camera cost $10, and it’ll probably take me another hour or two to replace the gears. An hour or two of my time, believe it or not, is actually worth more than $60 — but realistically, it’s not like I’ll be using those specific hours to “work.”

Hmm… what should a cheap and lazy bastard do?

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