For last year’s Christmas, my partner and I decided to give each other handmade gifts. Earlier last year, I had an accident with our Instax Camera where the flash broke and could no longer take unlit pictures. We were both heartbroken because I gifted her that camera on our first Valentine’s day.
So, what I set my mission to fix it and gift her our old lovely instax camera. The process itselt was very simple. I unassembled it and figured out that I just needed to unsolder three cables from the broken flash, and then solder the new one. The problem is that Fuji (and I guess generally most of the companies nowadays) are not great with part replacement, less for older devices.
What I ended up doing was going to the Facebook Marketplace and trying to find the same instax model for sale. Luckily, I was able to find one close to where I live that had some issues, which made it great as a replacement as to reuse old parts as much as possible.
The week before Christmas, I asked a couple friends to help me with desoldering the old flash and soldering the new flash. Dissassembling the devices was very quick. The iFixit guides are super handy, as well as a youtube video that showed me some hidden screws that weren’t in the guide. Then, we went through the process of desoldering and soldering the flash again. I was pretty nervous because of my previous experience of burning things I tried to solder/desolder lol, but my friends were great at it and, after quickly putting it back together, I was able to take my first picture with it in almost a year.
Needless to say, both my partner and I were very happy about having our camera back. We took pictures of our Christmas dinner, dogs, and put it on our 2024 album.
Didn’t take much pictures of the process of fixing the camera, but here is a picture of the camera in question.
neauoire - Would love to take a look at that playlist! I recently got back into exercising, so have been looking for good hype songs.