I tried fixing mirrorless cameras - here's the truth about each brand's build quality

[Andrew Reid]

Leica M Typ 240... 2012, this was before Panasonic got more involved with making Leica's stuff.

I'll give this a 10/10. The whole motherboard slides out really easily. I baked it in the oven to bring it back to life from completely dead. The solder needed a reflow apparently. 200 degrees C at 7 minutes did the trick. Custom chips all over the place. Utterly beautiful mechanically and in terms of the quality of connectors, cables, lots of metal parts and brilliantly designed internals.

Next up another older camera, Nikon D700.

Very impressive motherboard with separate analogue to digital converters.

Probably why the colour science still has the edge on the newer sensor designs with their inline on-chip A/D.

Nikon own branded chips.

By contrast in the newer Leica Q...

It's actually a Samsung.

And the lens relies on a LOT of digital correction, so it's certainly not in same league as a Leica M when it comes to the quality of parts or optics.

End result in terms of the images is very nice though.

We'll call it the Samsung Q.

Onto Fuji now and I have fixed an X-Pro3 and the old X-Pro1. The original had a lot of Fujifilm's own CPUs inside.

It's very well made but has a lot of traditionally soldered wires on the mainboard, old-school style. This continues with some of the newer models too.

X-Pro3 was an easy fix, a ribbon cable (FPC) had come loose where the sensor plugs into the mainboard. Some tape over the socket had shrunk in the heat and pulled it ajar.

Pictured above is the X-Pro1 circuitboard, it's more proprietary whereas X-Pro3 looks a bit more generic on the inside.

Here is an oven bake of a Panasonic LX15 mainboard...

The components can withstand very high-heat and usually cold solder joints are responsible for a wide range of issues.

Unfortunately in this case I made a mistake with the stop watch and the card slot fell off 🙂

Here is a sensor with hot mirror... the IR cut filter glows pink in this shot.

If you remove it you get an IR capable camera and can also shoot normally if you add the IR cut filter to the front of the lens instead.

I think this sensor is from my Lumix LX100 II or could be Sony RX100, I forget 🙂

Now onto Sony and their smaller cameras are too tightly packed.

FPC cables develop cracking over time as some of the metal is folded and bent too tightly to fit the smaller bodies.

This is an RX100 and it's very common to see these fail on the cable that connects the lens.

A relatively easy fix actually and replacement FPCs are $5 on Aliexpress.

But I don't rate Sony's quality as highly as Fuji or Panasonic so far.

Onto Canon and I have had a very bad experience so far with their modern cameras. The DSLRs were much better made (i.e. 5D Mark III which was easy to tear down and remove the OLPF back in the day!)

They use extremely fragile FPC connection sockets and the ribbon cables themselves are brittle and cheap. Sometimes a few bends and they tear. Doesn't make for a stress free repair that's for sure.

In contrast to Panasonic, with the lovely GX80 it's in a different league and take a bit of extra abuse by an amateur repairer.

I've done a lot more than what I have time to post today but probably will do a deeper look at stuff for YouTube or the blog.

I rate as follows the brands then...

1. Leica (the extra cost is noticeable on the inside)

2. Panasonic (they know how to sensibly build a camera and logically lay out stuff, and they don't scrimp on component quality)

3. Fujifilm (high repairability score and robust, sensible designs)

4. Nikon (high repairability but many of the newer cameras not up to high-standards they set during DSLR era)

5. Sony (they try to pack in too much)

6. Canon (really quite terrible, cheap cost cut components, and badly laid out)

Stay tuned for more. I do this just for fun, and really enjoy it. Plus now I have a oven baked Leica 240 to play with 🙂