Dissecting my Kodak LS743

My Kodak LS743 gave up the ghost with the mys­ter­i­ous E45 error, which from what I can gather, is rather com­mon on Kodak cam­eras. It had been show­ing the error just every now and then, but recently, every time I turned it on, it would dis­play the error. It’s a pity, because for a con­sumer cam­era, I could hardly fault it.

From scour­ing the for­ums, it appears that the error is triggered by some particles being lodged in some sensor related to the lens. The Kodak site itself was unhelp­ful, simply sug­gest­ing that you take it in for ser­vi­cing (expens­ive!). But some people have man­aged to recover their cam­era from the error – and judging that a mas­sacred cam­era isn’t much worse than a non-​​functioning cam­era, I took to it with a screwdriver.

The res­ult is illus­trated down below. Try as I might, I couldn’t work out how to take the lens out for clean­ing – there must be some screws I’ve missed. Sur­pris­ingly, it’s still boot­able in that state – you just need to hold the bat­tery in its slot because I’ve taken out the bit of plastic that holds it in. But no luck – still get­ting the error.

A bit of a waste of time, but inter­est­ing non­ethe­less. Trivia: when you take the back panel off, you can clearly see the Sharp brand­ing on the LCD panel. Will we buy another Kodak? I’d recom­mend against them. All the Kodaks we’ve had have died in mys­ter­i­ous cir­cum­stances. I’d like to get another con­sumer cam­era one day – tak­ing my SLR around is a little awk­ward sometimes.

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