Saturday, July 16, 2011

Disassembly of a Logitech Quick Cam

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I picked up this Logitech Quick Cam Chat for Skype (worst product name contender) at the local Goodwill for $2.00 the other day. This is the third Logitech webcam I’ve bought for $2.00 or less in the past year. This was the first that didn’t work well. The image was incredibly blurry. So I figured I would take it apart and see what the problem was.
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I started with the obvious screw.
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And two not so obvious screws under the rubber pad.
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Unfortunately they only held the stand together.
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So I looked for the next obvious ingress, a notch in the back of the shell.
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A quick pry with a jewelers screwdriver and the blue piece came off.
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There’s a light pipe that transmits the light from the LED that tells you the camera is on.
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The main guts removed.
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The lens focusing adjustment ring slips off.
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I unscrewed the lens and cleaned it with a precision optical tissue (one of those wipes for glasses) and some rubbing alcohol.
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I screwed the lens back on and hooked the camera up to my shop PC. I adjusted the focus and…
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A nice grainy, yet typical for the era, webcam picture (of me taking a picture of the webcam with my camera while it takes a picture of me taking a pic of it…) I think that what had happened is that somehow the lens had been screwed in too much, jamming it somehow. In any case it works.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice "step-by-step" of non-destructive access to the element into this webcam--thanks! These cameras are plug-n-play to the Raspberry Pi. I have been looking for a sensible method to mount a pair of these that does not look like a frog, as I do stereo video streaming experiments using the small computer as a wireless web server.

Nick Carter said...

Good to know as I'll be getting a Pi one of these days...

T0t4r4 said...

Heap thanks man for that post !!!

Unknown said...

Saved me from another destruction beyond repair. Thanks so much!

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
gbenyov said...

Thank You for repair help!

Anonymous said...

When I pried off the blue cover, I could not get the main body open, so I started prying on the ring around the lens. Suddenly it came unstuck, and I realized it was a focus ring which would not move before! Now I could spin it freely and get the focus to work without having to open the main body! Whoo hoo! Still works! A little grainy, but good enough for something from my junk box that hasn't been used in 15 years!

Felice Luftschein said...

Great to hear! Nick

Adrián said...

Thank you! even now in 2020, this helped me to get mine fixed!