Cannon SX200-IS “Lens Error, Restart Camera” Fix

Note: This worked for my camera, It may or may not work for yours, do at your own risk. Also, apologies for the photo quality…my camera wasn’t working.

Just as I was about to take some photo’s to document a new blog post I turned on my camera and “Oh-Noes!! The lens has become fully extended and won’t go back in! and the camera is saying ‘Lens Error, Restart Camera’ Golly!”. According to various reports this is pretty much the death knell for the camera.

Now, I’m not in the habit of keeping receipts, and I think the shop I bought it from has gone out of business anyway. So I did the only sensible thing and decided to take a screwdriver to it.

Unfortunately I wasn’t expecting to actually fix the thing so I didn’t keep a record of the order of screw removal, but you basically have to keep unscrewing things until the side opposite the USB socket is visible as seen in the following picture.

You should now be able to see the large capacitor used for the camera flash, and next to it the side of an electric motor used for extending the lens when zooming. Just visible in the space between the top of the motor and a circuit board should be the two solder tabs at the top of the motor casing.

Next fire up a 5 volt power supply and attach some crocodile leads with small wires attached to the other side (I used the cut off legs from some resistors).

Next take the two leads and poke them on to the solder pads at the top of the motor. The lens zoom motor should start to turn. If your lucky the lens should start to retract, if not switch the wires around and try again.

When the lens is retracted back in reassemble the camera and try turning it on. If your lucky, everything should be working fine now!

If you’re like me you’ll probably end up with a few spares….I like to think of it as streamlining the camera…