Anyway, todays tutorial is going to focus on fixing the 7610 keypad. My keypad became almost impossible to use and I’d never bothered to investigate the the problem. The keys had to be pressed with an almighty force to produce a keypress. I’d almost comitted the phone to bin, but it was worth a look first.

First I removed the battery, front fascia and plastic keypad. From here on a T6 Torx Screwdriver is required. There are 6 torx screws, but only the bottom 4 need to be removed to get the PCB keypad free.

Once you have these 4 torx screws out, the PCB keypad can be levered up at the bottom and gently slid downwards and removed. This is a delicate piece of kit so you need to take care. The keypad consists of a PCB with a white sticky label (membrane) on top, which holds the bubble contacts in place. Gently peel back the white sticky label, but don’t remove it from the PCB entirely (otherwise you’ll have to realign it later).

This is where I noticed the contacts on the membrane side were badly corroded. The contacts should be nice and shiny but mine had black spots dotted around. I used a mixture of Brasso metal polish and a small screwdriver and cotton bud to remove the dirt and polish the contacts. I also cleaned the PCB contacts before sticking the membrane back on to the PCB.

Having refitted the torx scews I fired up the phone and the origional keypress feel was restored. Result!

It has a fancy touchscreen colour LCD which flips out and rotates. I’ve always wondered how such movement is possible and I’d soon have the opportunity to answer my own question. Only a few days into the holiday and the LCD screen stopped working. Initially it was possible to view the screen when it was folded out to about 30 degrees. Opening it up to 90 degrees and the screen would simply switch off, it just went black. I knew the camera was still functional as the touch screen still worked – just I couldn’t see anything on it. The viewfinder in the camera still works too.

A quick look around the Internet turned up a whole load of people with the same problem. Some people suggested it could be the backlight in the LCD or a CCD Chip problem (Outlined here) but alas my model was not listed.

It was time to get the screwdriver and find the real cause of the problem. Removal of side panel on the camera was straight forward. It’s easy to slip and scratch the case, so I recommend using masking tape to cover the plastic to prevent damage. There are two small screws on the front of screen and one on the hinge. There are two further screws on the rear of the screen/hinge assembly which are only accessible by tilting the screen at an angle, then rotating it slightly. This allows removal of the LCD cover and you can inspect for loose ribbon cables. Mine looked fine so I had to move on to the main camera body.

The main body has about 4 or 5 really obvious screws holding the side on. There is one non obvious screw under the battery. As you remove this, it frees up a small piece of plastic which drops out (and is easily refitted afterwards). Now it’s just a case of carefully levering the side off. I used a small screwdriver, working my way from the bottom to the top of the camera body. It came free quite easily so don’t get too carried away with the levering. You need to be super careful at this point, as the side is still attached to the camera with several ribbon cables.

There should be enough room to look inside and see the back of the LCD hinge.  At least two ribbon cables seem to disappear into the back of the hinge. There is a small strip of sticky felt covering two further screws on the back of the LCD hinge. Remove these two and you should be able to lift up the semi-circle wedge of plastic. I then levered out a smaller piece of plastic which had a ribbon cable clipped into it.

This gave me a good view of the ribbon cable from the screen, past the hinge and on into the camera. I inspected this area closely. That’s when I found the problem. There are two ribbon cables back-to-back which cross the hinge and enter the LCD screen. Just inside the camera, one of the cables in the back-to-back arrangement had clearly split – it looked like someone had cleanly cut the cable with a pair of scissors. This ribbon cable must be replaced in order to restore the LCD to a working condition. Unfortunately I have yet to find a source for this cable. So despite finding the problem I have yet to repair it. In theory with the right ribbon cable it would be a very easy repair.

This is clearly a design fault which has been caused by the rotating screen. Overtime the copper/plastic ribbon cable has become weak and split. I must say I am not best pleased with this and feel that Sony should repair the camera free of charge, although I also believe that given another few years the problem would reoccur, unless the quality of the plastic ribbon cable is improved.

Our customer needed a replacement right away so the only viable option was to replace it with a new unit. This left us with the broken Officejet. It seemed a shame to throw away this otherwise fully working unit, and not being a fan of arguing with foreign tech-support on the phone for hours on end in order to extract a replacement from someone, I decided to try to resolve the problem myself.

In order to access the cartridge carrier, the machine has to be dismantled pretty much entirely. This is not a difficult process but can be quite tricky, as some screws are hard to access with a normal screwdriver. In some cases I used a socket wrench with a torx bit.

Once you’ve got to the cartridges, you then need to devise some way to restore the connections to the broken tracks. I first looked at bridging the tear, but once I saw how small the tracks were, the idea went out the window. The following is what I decided upon:

In order to find wire thin enough, I split a small piece of stranded cable from an old PSU, and used one strand to reconnect each of the disconnected pads back to the PCB itself. The plastic was scraped from the back of the pad and then the wire carefully soldered in to place. The other end was soldered directly to the appropriate pad on the green PCB, traced back from the tear. Each of the wires was then secured with a small piece of electrical tape, to prevent shorts and movement which might break the joint.

It works! It turned out that the 3 or 4 hours it took to do this wasn’t a complete waste of time – the machine now runs again, but for how long?