Canon repair

The title of this post can’t possibly capture the full extent of frustration that comes with repairing modern Canon cameras. We’ve got everything here: serious damage from minor water ingress, excessive reliance on proprietary ICs, and complete unavailability of component-level spare parts. Things are so bad that if you try to Google the part number of the faulty chip, you’ll find exactly this page, plus maybe one more - also from my own site. This Canon EOS R10 arrived with a straightforward backstory. It was bought for parts after "a little bit of water damage", with the idea of repairing and reselling it (not by me). However, the "simple repair" didn't pan out, and I received it with the diagnosis: "won't turn on" So let's disassemble it and dig deep into the circuitry of Canon's latest-generation mirrorless models.

The Canon 6D Mark II needs no introduction - an extremely popular full-frame camera for enthusiasts (in the past, at least). Somehow, I only got around to writing about its repair now - but better late than never. Today's patient arrived with the description: "dead as a dodo." I'm not quite sure what the owner meant by that, but the camera truly showed no signs of life. In this article: disassembly, interesting damage caused by an unknown liquid, and an unexpected culprit behind the failure.

The Canon 50mm f/1.4 is arguably the most popular - and probably the most failure-prone - lens in photo history. Yes, popularity amplifies the number of complaints, but objectively, there are genuine issues. Early batches were sensitive to even minor impacts — the helicoid ring would deform, and both manual and autofocus would fail. Over time, the planetary gear system would wear out, causing annoying rattle during manual and auto focusing. The motor used has a limited lifespan and fails eventually — even without drops, water damage, or abuse. The instance I got my hands on had the first two issues combined — so let’s tear it down and fix it.