I am finding there are some people selling new drives with detailed instructions as to how to install it yourself. It will save you money, right? Here is a photo of yet another of those do it yourself repairs I have had to service. This can end up costing $100 more than my price of doing the full repair in the first place. Sometimes it scraps the camera! Remember, all it takes is one goof and it goes into the shop with more problems than it originally had with just the bad drive.
This photo is of the back plane board on an FD88. This customer attempted to change the drive and broke chunks of the two connectors off and eventually tore the small, double connector completely off the board. The connector had to be soldered back on and two trace repairs made with 40 AWG wire to get it going again. The wire is about .2 mm thick. The double connector has 10 terminals that are spaced .5 mm apart. The entire connector is about 5 mm square. If you like your camera, just dont try this yourself. The risk of further damage isnt worth it.
This camera was saved, some are not.
Update on: May 19, 2010
This section covers some of the issues with the Floppy Drive platform cameras.
FD News
Floppy platform cameras are still just as popular as ever and doing well in the resale market. The FD100 and FD200 are awesome cameras and the floppy units are still a great convenience to most people that are in the field or just don't want to mess with CD or Memory Stick cameras.
Take a look at what FD91 cameras are reselling for!
Some people ask me what can be done to prolong the life of a floppy camera. The only things I can say is keep them clean, install an LCD protector, use plastic shutter door floppies, if you loan them out, instruct the user as to the proper way to insert a disk and keep them out of the rain.
An interesting problem has been noted lately with the FD100 and FD200 Mavica cameras.
Here is the symptom...
You turn on the camera and all you get is a very short flash of the power light (LED) and nothing happens. The camera wont power up.
If you remove the battery and reinsert it, the process will repeat but the camera never comes on.
This isnt a really bad problem and I have a better than OEM fix for it. This repair is about half the price of sending it to Sony. Please contact me for details on this repair.
