Long time no post :-)
I finally got to go through some SD890 and SD990 cameras I had picked up for little money over time (years it seems), I don't even recall whether some were bought defunct for like a fiver in case I need an LCD, flash, jogdial or whatever.
Something odd happened though and that leads me to my first question to you folks. Three out of like 15 extended the lens made some audible choke and failed with a lens error. I was curious if I could get a FW dump in spite of that but could not.
I get up to the CHDK splash screen can even invoke the CHDK scripting screen, I think but then the cam shuts down. Can that shutdown be thwarted?
Universal dumper using Canon basic fails as I obviously can't start up in Play mode (the lens error is detected in it, too) and hence can't press the func button at the required time, the cam is already off by then. A lot of things come to mind that I can / could try, like disconnecting the optical unit, seeing what happens when powering on the camera, I never tried that. I have faulty (even) older models I'd rather explore this with. If I really wanted to I could of course swap optical units giving error and not between two cameras, or maybe connect one in a different housing depending on cable lengths. Where that second camera would come from brings me to thought no 2...
Something else I saw to a degree that bothers me is dust inside the optical unit which shows up on pictures. To horrible amounts in some cameras, to noticeable amounts if you look for it in more. Unacceptable to me in either case.
Every second camera had this out of 20. More SD990s than SD890s although I don't know if that is a pattern. At first I thought the sensor gets hold of the dust in some way and the prospect of having to remove the sensor with marking screw positions and counting unscrew rotations made me throw up my hands in despair, that is the one thing besides lens disassembly that I always shied away from, everything else is pretty much in components not less serviceable than a PC only tinier :-) When thinking about it though I realized that the dust is altered by zooming towards some flat surface like the ceiling, so it must rather be inside the lens, probably on one of the rear elements (otherwise it would stay a spot no matter what's projected onto it), maybe that's less impossible to disassemble and blow out with like canned air.
Hence the question: Has anybody successfully done this on some Ixus / SD? I mean I have seen repair places offer this for below a hundred bucks years back so it must be doable with reasonable effort but these days I could get three to five used cameras for that if I can find some. I just dislike the idea of getting rid of that lot and would much rather acquire the skill to fix this - then probably do it twice and settle for knowing that I can but we'll see ;-)
