Defective CCD In Your Older Digital Camera? Don’t Throw It Away Just Yet!

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Defective CCD In Your Older Digital Camera? Don’t Throw It Away Just Yet!

By guest | October 27, 2009

If you are like one of an estimated 75 million owners of a digital camera, at some point in time, your camera will more than likely develop one or more problems and would be in need of digital camera repair. The usual problems seen are broken LCD screens, busted battery doors and stuck lenses or shorted out mainboards.

There are a set of digital camera models however, that develop their own unique problems, all stemming back to a batch of defective CCDs that Sony produced and used in these camera models.

If your camera takes only solid black photos, or blurry pink/purple photos, call your manufacturer and ask them if the camera is on the CCD recall list today! If you have a camera that is on the recall list that is not yet having issues, it will develop them in the future so it’s best to get it sent in and repaired now before the recall comes to an end!

To start with, what is a CCD? A CCD is a Charged-Coupled Device, that “enables the transportation of analog signals through successive stages and are used as a form of memory or delaying samples of analog signals.”

Now for that in English:… basically it changes the light that comes in through the lens into a digital signal that can then be saved onto the memory card.

What’s the big deal with the faulty CCD? Well Sony produced a series of CCDs for various digital cameras between the years of 2003 and 2005, for at least 20 different models. And in higher heat and humidity conditions, the CCDs would begin to fail, producing some crazy looking images or causing a black screen to show on your camera (Before you starting thinking your camera has a bad CCD, PLEASE check and make sure your “display” button is not pressed and just shutting the LCD off).

So as an owner of one of these cameras what does it mean for me? Simple: If you own a camera that is covered under the Canon digital camera repair recall, and your camera develops a problem as described above, you can generally send your camera to the manufacturer and get the CCD repaired for free. The most highly affected companies are of course Canon and Sony. If you need to get your Sony camera repair these manufacturers are standing behind their products and fixing their faulty CCDs. At one time the manufacturers were just replacing the cameras with new models, but lately it seems, they have gotten the CCDs fixed and are replacing them for you. You get to keep using the camera you love, and now with a new CCD it will keep working for years to come!

As Sony is the original sensor manufacturer for all of the other manufacturers’ products listed (and given the vast array of products that they manufacture themselves) it should come as no great surprise that Sony has by far, the greatest number of affected products. This does not mean that Sony makes a bad product in any way, it was a problem with the design or manufacturing behind a discontinued product only.

Don’t toss out your digital camera if it has a defective CCD and is on this recall list, have it fixed at no charge! The best part about getting your camera repair under this recall is that they will inspect, test, calibrate and update the camera as well as replacing the CCD with an updated version that will not fail as the first one did!