can anyone connect me with someone who understand how camera flash circuitry and bulbs work? i'm trying to repair an 80s 35mm film point ant shoot with built in flash that has almost no records of it even existing on the internet
googling anything about how flashbulbs work online is hopeless, anything i find is either about modern digital photography or completely unrelated
this is the camera i want to repair, a Kodak Hobby 35mm produced in brasil in the mid-1980s
i've taken it apart several times and i know most of the mechanism but i don't understand enough about the flash circuitry (and i haven't been able to pull the entire board out yet)
so far what i've done is try to naively replace the burnt out bulb with a similarly sized modern one, after a lot of swearing and fiddling i did manage to replace it but the result is while the flash does fire now, it's extremely dim and doesn't serve its lighting purpose at all
so fast-forward a little, i now know more about xenon flash tubes and how they work, and there are currently two suspects in this case:
- the new lamp i used as replacement expects more than 250V to fire
- the 250V capacitor (a small film one, mind) could be bad
since the charge board is hard to take apart in order to replace the capacitor, i've instead sourced another bulb which seems to be more suitable for this application and it should be here in a few days
this time i'll record the process of replacing it for those curious
ha ha ha
the new bulb worked so well i accidentally blinded myself!
i recorded myself replacing the bulb without a voice over, gonna check if it turned out good and edit it together later :)