This post is as a public service. WARNING – an Olympus E-PM1 camera has some LEFT-HAND thread screws. I’ll show you where these blighters are later.
Manufacturers really seem to hate people taking their gear apart, but I’ve never come across Olympus’s sort of craftiness before. There’s no good reason for them to make these screws left-hand thread, other than to make you strip the soft plastic they’re set into if you have the temerity to try to take your own property apart. Evil bastards. It’s not like a bicycle crank on the left-hand side, where there’s a damn good reason for the left-hand thread.
I quite liked this camera, despite the plastic battery door hinges breaking off after a year. It’s pocketable, but can take a decent EVF if necessary, I have a VF-4. I recently dropped the camera, and on power-up I hear this noise (recorded form about 2cm away). The clunk is fine and has always been like that, the death rattle is new.
Which does not fill me with confidence that this camera is long for this world, although the pictures are fine. I can almost count the plastic gear teeth wearing, and it’s loud enough to draw attention, which is a drag for photographing people. I suspect it’s slower off the mark than it used to be, too. So I thought I’d pop the back and take a look to see if something is obviously wrong.
The first port of call when taking any piece of consumer gear to bits is always the Big G, some people post videos of the full tear-down, which is how I learned to fix my Canon EF 18-55 zoom lens the first time for a £2.50 ribbon cable from ebay, five hours of my time and a hell of a lot of bad language. When the same ribbon cable failed a second time I came to the conclusion I can live without a crappy zoom lens with an inherent lease of life of four years, so I tossed it so that it doesn’t waste any more of my time or raise my blood pressure. I have a Canon EF-S 60mm macro lens which is a nice telephoto and a EF 35mm which gives me a 50mm FOV in 35mm film-speak. I don’t need a lens that only goes down to f4.5 any more, and I use a MFT for the sort of run and gun stuff I used that 18-55 for.
I didn’t find much about how to take the E-PM1 apart, but I am deeply grateful to this guy not so much for the video, because I’m damned if I can follow that, but the comment below it
A timelapse of me removing the IR blocking filter on a brand new mirrorless system camera. The observant among you may notice that i put it together and take it apart a few times, this is because the camera is put together very unintuitively. A few screws are left hand thread and two of the screws holding the sensor are hidden under the moisture seal around the accessory port.
Which saved me wrecking the left-hand screws 🙂
How to take an Olympus Pen Mini E-PM1 apart
I only took the back off, before concluding that as the camera works for now and the cause of the rattling noise was not immediately obvious I can put up with it, so I reassembled the camera and it still works – well, the same as it did before. The usual disclaimer – take the frickin battery out, there may be capacitors charged to high voltages1 so don’t go pawing the works, you will void the warranty and may wreck the camera, these aren’t designed to be serviceable by Joe Public. I actually ran it okay in the disassembled mode because I was trying to find the source of the death rattle, sometimes you gotta work on equipment live 😉
so if you want to go further, well, you’re on your own. Shut up wibbling and tell me which ones are the left-hand thread screws, and any other gotchas, you say?
Imagine a vertical line through the picture of the camera bottom, above. Draw it through the centre of the tripod mount. To the right of it you see a block of grey soft plastic housing the battery and SD card, with three holes? Every single one of those blighters is left-hand thread – you turn it clockwise to unscrew. Grr. Try and unscrew it the normal way, and with enough force you’ll strip the plastic.
To pop the back you need to ping the metal clip in the flash hot shoe – it looks like this underneath, which should give you an idea of how to take it out – lift the clip by the front of the hotshoe and ease out.
Take out the rear two of the four screws in the hotshoe mount – all normal thread, and loosen the front two, you don’t have to take them out, but let the piece of plastic with the contacts rise, so the case back can come out OK.
Now you can ease the back off, with the screen attached – the flexible cables are on the right-hand edge of the camera looking at the screen.
All those crafty left-hand thread screws are self-tappers, here’s a close up of the little devils. I suppose we have to be grateful Olympus didn’t give us a random mix… Obviously keep ’em in a separate pot from the normal thread machine screws from the other side.
This E-PM1 is walking wounded
The ghastly rattle sounds like plastic gears slipping teeth. It’s not broken enough to push further, but on the other hand it draws attention to itself and the missing battery door is a PITA which will soon become a missing battery or SD card. Without the rattle I could face up to the £20 door replacement, but I don’t think this will be a good investment.
I now have the problem of looking for a replacement, particularly now the battery compartment door has fallen off, that was a separate weakness of the E-PM1, rectifiable for a £20 spare part! Ideally I want it handy like the E-PM1, able to take my VF-4, because composing on a LCD sucks at times, you can’t really see anything in summer sunlight
I’ve learned not to be too geeky is selecting a P&S – I have gone to MFT because all in one P&S cameras always got grit in the zoom causing them to fail with a lens fault, and crap gets into the sensor so you still have to take the buggers apart every so often to decoke the sensor with compressed air2.
I am harder on cameras than most it seems. If you overspecify a P&S you end up with a bad full-size camera. Ideally I want it to take the same battery as the BLS-5 battery as the Pen, so I have a spare.
At the moment, it seems the rather girly E-PL7 seems to have the right price point in the secondhand market – the marketing is bizarre, seems like one of the USPs according to Olympus is that I can flip the LCD screen down below the camera to take selfies of myself in my latest pair of high heels. For all that marketing flummery I can live with a white3 point and shoot, although a black camera gives you fewer reflections on close-ups. Let’s hear all about it from Ciara, whoever she may be:
What with the pink shoulder bag and the necklace strap. I don’t think I am the target market at all 🙂 You can just picture the meeting of marketing droids at Olympus Central
“Folks, we’re having this thought shower because we want a new small MFT camera to leverage the design work for the [insert OM-D parent design]. Trouble is that World + Dog take their snaps on their smartphones these days. Marketing, what sector are we not targeting at all?”
“Young female Millennials, boss”
“Right, imagine some young trendy thought leader, interested in clothes, fashion and blogging. Let’s have some really cute accessories. Oh and in pink, FTW.”
And thus, dear reader, was the E-PL7 born. Presumably all the guys want the chunky OM-D design, or they’re still using their smartphones. The geeks at AP felt the same.
The audio (for video) ain’t so good on this, unless Ciara actually has a voice like gravel and cut glass with lots of vocal fry, but audio was pretty rough on the E-PM1. I always shoot separate sound, because, well, wind exists and you need plastic fur to fight that. Plus the microphone needs to be near the sound source, not near the camera.
You win some and you lose some. I’ll probably ebay the E-PM1 body with the classic for parts or not working, perhaps someone with more patience and dexterity can make something of it or swap bits around, a working screen has to be worth something.
Oh and I need to use the neoprene camera case I got for it, the replacement is pretty much the same size 😉 The problem was the neck strap of the Pen really got in the way so I took the bugger off, what I want is a wrist strap for it. Still, it’s the first camera I’ve dropped on a hard surface, and in the end if you ain’t out there using your cameras then they’re simply tech jewellery.
- the flash is a separate unit and low voltage regs say you ain’t putting 400V on the modified mini-HDMI port it plugs into, but for all I know there’s a CCFL inverter for the screen. Be careful out there ↩
- I know, I know, the cognoscenti say never let a can of compressed air (butane these days, it seems) because the propellant will cover your sensor in gunk. Sensor cleaning geekery, and more here. But a P&S you have to take to bits to clean anyway, so it’s on borrowed time as it is. One of the things I like about the MFT cameras I have is they seem good at self-cleaning, though my Canon EOS450 is also good. But I used to have the EOS 350, and that was a nightmare, it had no self-clean at all. ↩
- the camera was also available in black. But presumably in the secondhand market I am buying from a female vlogger who has moved on after four years, anyway very few on the secondhand market are black. Four or five years seems to be the sweet spot for secondhand MFT P&S cameras, and about the time I take to wreck one on average ↩
My garden strimmer has a left hand thread nut holding the blades on which confuses me every time. I can see no operational reason for this other that the fact that the designer forgot which way the motor turned or didn’t allow for an extra gear in the drivetrain somewhere. I can see no reason for the ones on the camera though other than to ( unsuccessfully) foil people like you.
Kudos for dismantling and, more importantly, remantling the camera successfully 🙂
You have a drivetrain in your strimmer? Presumably petrol then – mine is direct drive off a universal electric motor; after 20 years of service I had to re-oil the motor bearings to stop the horrible high pitched sound, so much for sintered bearings never needing oil!
I can see some point to the left-hand thread on a strimmer – most people are right-handed so the action wants to be counter-clockwise when viewed from the top. That way the cutting action is leading as you swing your right arm from right to left, where you have more power, but the reaction to the cutting action pushes the strimmer away from you. That inconveniently unscrews a right-hand thread from the blade mount.
It was luck that I didn’t proceed past the point of no return with this camera, I couldn’t trace the source of the death rattle by listening, so I was stuffed for a fix.
Your explanation is plausible so I retract my allegations 🙂
The strimmer is actually electric but it’s a hefty piece of kit – 6′ long, shoulder strap and is definitely a 2 handed operation. The motor is a 1kW universal type ( judging by the racket ) and gives a fair torque kick on start up. You’ve seen my garden, a weedy single handed job from B&Q isn’t going to cut it ( neither literally nor metaphorically ).
I went electric because I’ve had poor experiences with petrol kit that’s only used intermittently. You spend more time trying to start the thing than actually cutting.