Canon A530 broken: lens extraction problem¶

I dropped the camera one (after owning it for 2 months), didn't affect the camera in any way. After 1 year and two months, suddenly the lens only got out till halfway. Tried to shake it a bit, which helped to retract it after a while. The problem immediately returned, though.

Slowly trying to push it back in worked. After a few tries, the camera failed to extract more than 3 millimeters, making a rattling noise.

Today I dismantled the camera to check out the source. It turned out to be a broken tooth on one of the small plastic gears that drive the lens. Just one tiny piece of broken plastic. Well, actually two. I'm pretty sure one of the broken teeth is Canon's fault. There was no dust or filth in the camera. The other might broken tooth might be my fault when slowly trying to push the camera back in.

It is probably impossible to get replacement gears.

I took out the broken gears and put the camera back together again - that way I could extract the lens by hand and perhaps continue to make non-zoom pictures. I put everything back correctly (as the camera turned on OK), but the camera software detected that something was wrong with the lens extraction mechanism and gave me the familiar error ("lens failure" (in Dutch)).

Sigh sigh sigh.

Before opening it, I got back to the shop asking for the price of a repair job. They guessed 100-200 Euro. And a new(er) camera (the A560) now costs 155 Euro. So: no repair.

I quite liked the camera, but I'm not sure if I'll continue buying canon cameras. If anyone knows of a study kind of pocket camera: please leave comment. Especially if someone knows a camera without a zoom as that's bound to make it all more robust.