Canon 20d: The autopsy

The autopsy is complete.



All of the photos (and any clever comments I could muster) can be seen here:

http://www.pbase.com/gmr2048/20d-dissection&page=all

I have to say, I agree with Canon's diagnosis. There was no saving this patient. It's amazing. The camera didn't get all that wet in the accident, but that didn't stop death and destruction from raining down on all the little internal bits.

Thanks to this place for hosting the PDF parts catalog with exploded 20D which I used as a step by step deconstruction manual:

www.customslr.com/technical/EOS_20D_Parts%20Catalog.pdf

Canon 20D; The obituary.

After dunking my faithful 20D in the ocean a few weeks back, I decided to send it to Canon and see if it was fixable. At first they quoted me $300 for the repair, based on (I guess) my description of the problem.

So I sent the camera in, hopeful. After receiving it and actually looking at the guts, they determined there was "Severe liquid damage to the internal parts. Cost
of repair is equal to replacement value. Unit is beyond economical
repair. We are, therefore, returning your equipment to you un-repaired". I received the dead unit back today.

Bummer. Good thing there I had "Idiot Insurance".

So, on to "Plan B", I suppose. Dissection of the 20D as described here (note: it's a PDF):

www.customslr.com/technical/EOS_20D_Parts%20Catalog.pdf

It probably won't accomplish much besides satisfying my curiosity of what lies inside the little magic black box. But there's not much else to do with it at this point. An who knows, maybe with some rinsing in tap water, something will revive. I know, doubtful. It's far more likely I'll end up with a dozen little zip-lock bags of parts. (I plan on putting one PDF-page-worth of dissected parts per zip-lock bag, so reassembly is at least theoretically possible. Theoretically.

Ready?...GO!

This post is like one of those episodes of "Lost" where they summarize the whole season in a single hour...

Aiight, many weeks (months?) since my last post. Busy beyond reason. Here's my "season summary":

--Finished the planning of, and participated in, the perfect wedding to the perfect girl (awww). Complete with slideshow.

--Went on a 10 day honeymoon to Maui. Vacation...fantastic. 12 hours in the airplane each way...not so much. But it was a good enough reason for me to buy a fancy new iPod. Welcome to 2001. I love the bleeding edge.

--Biked down a volcano on a too-small 60lb beachcomber while wearing a bigass motorcycle helmet.

--Snorkled with sea turtles



--Watched the sunset (and sunrise...different days) from the top of a 10,000' volcano.



--Saw a sugarcane harvest, where they flash-burn acres of sugarcane fields creating mushroom clouds (and tons of smoke and soot all over the island).



--Saw the grave of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh on the absolute ass-end of Maui (but oh, what a scenic ass-end it is!).



--Snorkeled at Molokini...extra cool, half-eroded volcanic crater just off of Maui.

--3 or 4 days into the trip, I dunked my 20D in the Pacific right about here, killing it. Worst part about it is that I had to spend the remaining week of our trip with an extra-crappy semi-underwater point-and-shoot. The resulting shots were not pretty. Anyway, here's the final shot (at least it was a nice one). My girl, in the rain, in front of a rainbow while stopped along the Hana Highway in NE Maui. Shot number 16,932. Only two years old. Last frame of the 20D. Farewell, friend.



--Filed an insurance claim for my soggy camera.

--Bought a new 30D. Hello, new friend!

--Did tons of other fantastic, touristy things on Maui, but I can't remember any more. Besides, my eyes are going crossed from looking at this computer screen all day.

--Came back to an office moving in two weeks (that was two weeks ago).

--Moved the office this past weekend. Including new phone system, new phone service, new network hardware, and countless glitches. Today was the first day back for the users. Oh man. I need a vacation.

Review: MediaGear 40GB portable storage device (hard drive/card reader)

Abridged version: Run for your f*cking lives. Don't touch this piece of shit (or it's 60GB big brother) with a 10' pole. Read on for more...

==============================

This is a review I wrote for Amazon.com in November, about 12:30am when I *really* needed to be in bed...but I couldn't delay getting it down on paper, as it were. All the sentiments and emotions still hold true. I gave the company another try (cautiously) with it's 60GB version, and it behaved almost exactly the same way, requiring me to rescue files via data recovery programs (this time I was smart enough to leave copies of the pix on my laptop, unlike the SF episode detailed below). Also, this time, I was smarter in that I fdisked and formatted and scanned and surface scanned the drive before leaving home. Wish that would have helped. So without further ado...

I am so fuious, I am shaking as I type this. I have just returned from a trip across the country to San Francisco CA and this piece of junk unit nearly cost me 20% of the photos I took!!!

I shooot with a Canon 20D and both a 512MB and 1GB Kingston CF card. I have been using this setup since the 20D's release a couple of months ago with NO problems or corrupt files or anything similar.

On the trip to CA, I shot over 1,200 shots in a week. At one point, I encountered a problem dumping the 1GB card to the unit. The unit reported "data transfer error" at about 13% of the transfer. Since I could not empty the card, I could either format it and lose everything on it, or leave the pics on it, and use only the 512MB card. I took the second option.

So I unhappily limped through my vacation like that. Upon returning home, I attached the unit to my computer. Over 20% of the directories showed up as empty, or corrupt (these were directories which appeared to transfer fine in the filed!!!). I nearly fainted. Luckily (being an IT professional), I was able to mostly rescue 186 files (608MB of data), although some of those are destroyed images. All of the recovered files were recovered as Windows "CHK" files (after a few disk checks). Non-geeks would have been hard pressed to recover much without professional help.

Bottom line, when I ran Windows disk checks on the unit, it came back with *numerous* errors. Inexcusable! My unit was purchased new and was babied every step of the way. I even tested out the transfer of both JPG and RAW (CR2) files before leaving home. I guess I should have run full scandisks against the thing too. Lesson learned.

So, final word: run away from this unit. I don't care how good of a deal you think you're getting. I would not trust it to hold up my coffee table any more. Once I'm sure I've saved all I can from it, I'm fdisking and formatting it and it's going back to the store it came from. It's a shame. The unit cost the same as another model with half of the storage capacity. Guess the old adage "you get what you pay for" holds true here.

Buy something else. Trust me on this one.