Today has been a day of minor disasters. More on those once they come to some sort of resolution. But I’ve also effected a minor hardware triumph with my old Kodak CX6230 camera. For two years (and two house-moves: God bless my hoarding instinct!) I’ve occasionally switched it on to be confronted with the message:
Camera needs service
E10
a few seconds after displaying which, the camera switches itself off. I’d noticed before there were a few grumbling posts to a rather random webpage on Techtree.com India that suggested pressing the centre of the zoom toggle, but I’d tried their ideas in vain. By the time the camera was completely unusable, it was both outside warranty and had been dropped on one corner, which would of course be assumed to be the cause of damage that only I knew for certain had predated the ding.
Resolving to throw the camera away today, I decided to try one more time. Pressing the toggle as hard as I could (hurting my thumb) I switched it on. I kept the toggle pressed throughout the warm-up process, waited for the mechanism to unpack the camera’s optics and the firmware to boot up, and: it worked.
The trick seems to be to press the zoom rocker switch in (as the suggestions say) the middle of the rocker, very hard (as hard as you think the plastic will take), from before the camera is switched on until it either shows the E10 error or works. It also potentially needs this every time it’s switched on, or there’s no guarantee it won’t show the error again.
I now have, effectively, a new camera. I wonder what to do with it.
