Camera Tech Failure (somewhat gross!)

Equipment
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My camera is a compact digital, a Panasonic TZ100. I did think of buying a DSLR but carrying it and all the radios for SOTA is a non-starter. I could get a phone with a better camera but being old-school I like a camera to be sort-off camera shaped! Mine has an LCD display on the back which is used most of the time for composure etc. but it also has a viewfinder which is good when it’s sunny. You cannot see the LCD display so hold your eye to the viewfinder. Now the cool tech bit is there is an eye detector. When you hold your eye to the viewfinder the LCD switches off and the viewfinder on. Cool.

Well recently this eye detector stopped working. There is a button to press that causes the displays to swap. So I could use the viewfinder but the auto-switch fail was annoying. It became very annoying yesterday when my granddaughter was here and I wanted to take some photos. So I first downloaded the massive manual PDF and read up on the viewfinder. The button selects back display, viewfinder or auto and I could see the camera go through three modes. But no eye detection. Now I know the detector is basically a light detector for the viewfinder. i.e. when you place your eye over it, you block out the ambient light and it uses that as “eye present”. Careful examination show a small rectangular slot <1mm x 2mm by the viewfinder which was the light detector. I got a damp cloth and a plastic core alignment tool and pushed the cloth into the slot and saw I could remove some dirty substance. A quick dry off and eye detection worked again. The dirty substance was blocking the light so in auto mode it was always thinking an eye was present.

Thinking back to the last viewfinder photos I can remember taking I did having a bit of a sneezing fit. Source of the dried out dirty substance found. I warned you it was a bit gross. :sneezing_face:

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S’NOT a problem :slight_smile:

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Our mothers told us to use a handkerchief to sneeze into. The NHS advises using the crook of our elbow.

I’ve never seen anyone suggest catching the produce on the back of a camera :person_shrugging:. Thanks to your experiment, we can all now discount that option. Thank you :woozy_face: (But full marks for the recovery)

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What I forgot to say was I was on a summit at the time and the camera was being held at around waist height in my right hand at my side. Had it been right in front of my face then it would have been obvious to check for “foreign matter”. But as it was to one side it shows how far and wide such matter can travel.

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Years ago, some Olympus cameras had a problem with insect infestation. Tiny bugs would get inside the body and feed on the grease. When you looked through the viewfinder, you could see them walking across the focusing screen, hugely magnified.
I was working as a photojournalist at the time and remember photographing Margaret Thatcher at a Conservative Party conference while an insect wandered across her face in the viewfinder. It was obviously distracting, but because it wasn’t on the film plane the photographs themselves were usually unaffected. Occasionally, though, an insect would stray onto the film, leaving a small silhouetted shape on the image.

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I have a Panasonic TZ-220 that has the same issue, although the detector window is about 1.5 mm x 5 mm.

I’ll give it a clean tomorrow and see what happens.

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