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Quick Fix: EVF
4 December 2023
Imagine our surprise the other day when we bounded down to the bunker like a happy dog only to find our Lowepro Trekker had fallen from its little table to the hardwood floor. If not surprise, horror.
Delicate cameras and fine optics are not designed to be dropped from even short heights. We know this. In all the years we've been shooting (ahem, all 53 of them), we've only dropped a camera once and it survived.
In this case (it was a Lowepro), no damage was done. It's heavily padded although quite light.
But when we turned on the Olympus E-PL1, the EVF displayed a flickering green screen, not the stable full-color view of the world we're used to. Apparently the EVF was the point of impact.
We did a little research. We didn't find our problem mentioned although there were quite a few complaints about a polarizing film on the EVF screen becoming blistered when sunlight enters the chamber. That's never happened to us, fortunately.
A replacement would be about $240, we learned, and a repair wasn't going to be much cheaper, we suspected.
So, remembering the Three Stooges solution to memory loss caused by a knock on the head (which is a second knock on the head), we attempted to restore functionality by tapping the top of the EVF with a finger.
Insistently.
Whatever was loose fell back into place and our full color view returned. And the EVF has remained functional since then.
The next time we have trouble remembering something, we think we'll try the same technique and tap the top of our head with that same finger. Insistently.
It can't hurt.