Broken Cam Update

Scanning the pictures of Laos is taking forever. Meanwhile, I took my camera to the Mamiya dealer and they said it would take way too long and cost way too much to fix it and that I should just buy a new one. Their best price for that was still nearly twice that of a second-hand in the US so I said "no thanks".

With nothing to lose, I decided to take the camera apart.

When you're as good as I am at breaking stuff, life sucks. But then you get good at fixing stuff. It doesn't nearly compensate but it's something.

This is the camera all patched up and ready to go... almost. The flat circuit-board-cable-thing that runs to the light cell was cut and there's no way of fixing that. I figured I would at least have a working camera to use with my light meter but then I realised there was a focusing problem.

When you look through the viewfinder, you can see the bottom and the top of the image are not on the same focal plane. The top won't focus at infinity for example. That means the lens took such a pounding that the body of the camera moved inward a little bit. It's not the lens because (1) we tested it on another camera at the shop and it looked fine and (2) the problem is the same with both my 80mm (that fell) and the 35mm (that stayed in my bag).

So now it's 1000% sure, the camera is 1000% toast. As near-new ones can be found on e-bay anywhere between $400 and $500, my trip to Laos wasn't so cheap after all!