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Tiny cute camera:

I’ve recently came accross a listing of Fujifilm X10 for about 20€, which said ‘Works perfectly fine, just Zoom is stuck at 112 mm’. I chose to pick-up this camera the same way I choose my romantic partners. I looked at it, found it cute and thought to myself - ‘I can fix you.’.

Repairs:

Luckily for me, the repairs were overwhelmingly straightforward. I was able to carry them out while on summer holidays at a beach-house with basically no tools.

What was wrong:
After removing the front pannel, you will find 3 tiny screws holding the lens housing in place. These have a tendency to come loose with repeated use and lodge themselves either in the On/Off (by the flash capacitor) gantry, or simply jam-up the lens rotation right under the front panel (which was the case for me).

All I need was:

• Small phillips head screwriver
  • to remover a million screws on th outside and inside of the camera.
  • get a magnetic-tip one, it helps a ton.
• T2 screwdriver
  • to remove a single tiny but long (well, if you consider 4mm to be long… which… ugh… I do) on the front of the camera.
  • this is necessary to remove the front panel.

Procedure:
Removing the front panel revealed where the jam is. Unfortunately this required a full dissassembly of the camera. However, it was very straight forward… but annoying because of all the screws which were holding the camera together. I even found this video where someone is fixing a similar problem, so I could follow along with dissassembly steps.

Results and first impressions:

The camera works like new! And is very super fun to use!

Probably the best feature of this camera for me is the size. It is positively tiny. I don’t have the largest hands, however this camera easily fits in the palm of my hand!

For size reference, it comfortably fits within the trackpad of the MacBook Pro you see in the background.

The FujiX10 is absolutely dwarfed by my Sony A6400, which is already a compact camera.

A giant size saving measure is the super compact zoom lens (28-112mm f:2-2.8), which also happens to be surprisingly bright!

Sample Photos:

This camera is from 2011, however, it punches way above its head.

Rest ashured, this camera is an absolute nugget, but it is 12MP which is plenty sharp if you frame your shot well, and do not rely on cropping in. Additionally, if you’re like me, you might enjoy having a bit of grungy grain in the images.

I’m sure I’ll take many pictures with this beaten-up nugget of a camera. You can follow its adventures with me on this webpage or Instagram.