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Posts: 14 | Thanked: 2 times | Joined on Jul 2006
#14
After many months of successful use of the camera, the camera stopped working. My system is version 21.2011.38-1.002. When I launch the camera (eg. by opening the shutter) I see a black screen instead of a camera image. After 4 seconds a yellow system message "operation failed" appears, and the application closes. During these two seconds I can click on several of the icons. The memory storage location icon reads normally. the "exposures" remaining reads normally: 999. Everything else I looked at looks. OK

I tried
* reboot. No effect.
* removing battery for hours and rebooting. This caused reset of time and date. No effect on camera problem.
* plugging the N900 in to a new Mac (system 10.6.8) in mass storage mode and doing a disk verify. It checked out OK.
* opening camera slide while USB mass storage is connected. During the 4 seconds, the "pictures available" displays shows a red 000. So this behavior is normal.
* invoking dmesg from xterm. I see messages accurately reporting camera slide being opened and shut.
* invoking "App. manager" and requesting updates. It says no updates are available.
* checking many forums and bug reports. No one reports a hardware failure of the camera module.
* invoking "camera-ui" from xterm. I get the command prompt again after 4 seconds. This happens whether I have the slide open or shut before or after invoking the command.

My software.
* no software installed in many months
* I have installed flashlight (it still works fine), vim, freecell, gnuplot, commercial word-to-go package downloaded from Maemo site.

My guess is that I have a hardware failure of the camera module. Is this likely or unlikely?
Is there a way I can test for this? Is there a way to query the camera module?

Thanks for your thoughts! TW