Chosen Solution
Hello, My other half inadvertently chipped the lens on my GoPro Hero4 Silver, so I needed to replace with another lens. I then followed your instructions on how to change it, as the easy way of doing it (essentially, yanking the lens out with pliers) looked rather barbaric. So I thought, let me do it the proper way and take everything apart. This appeared to be going well until I I turned the camera back on and had a weird tinge/fuzziness on the lens. No worries I thought, I must not have reassembled it properly. So I did this and in truth things got bad to worse. To cut a long story short, the unit will turn on, but only the front LCD will work, as will the power button. The record button and the settings button on the side won’t work either, so it’s not like I can even put the unit on Wi-Fi and use the app to see what I’m filming. So I’m now looking at the strong possibility that the whole unit itself will need to replaced, which is not what I want as I believe this unit can still be fixed/salvaged. Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated. Aaron
First… To replace the lens does not require to tear the whole thing apart – I found this out the hard way myself and now have a damaged Silver that doesn’t have a back screen. You could have just carefully pried off the ring around the original lens. then with a pair of vicegrips on the lens carefully turn it to the left and it will come right out. On the silver there are three flat ribbon connectors on the left side (Facing the front of the camera). When I disassemble a Silver I take a hair drier and heat up the front LCD, then using a small thin flathead screwdriver, pry up on the upper right side of the LCD. This is directly above the orange ribbon cable, it’s the black glass part. DO NOT FORCE. Keep heating and apply slight pressure until it comes up. If it breaks… no big deal, they’re not very expensive and easy to replace. Under this screen you can get to the ribbon cables. The large wide one is the back LCD, the one next to that is the touch screen, and the one above that is the button controls for the shutter and side button. Check these cables. The blurry part, I’d take out the lens and look at the image sensor to see if you’ve got dirt on it. If you’ve replaced the lens it probably needs to be focused.
Hello Richard, the device was replaced, but thanks for answering regardless. I sold it as spares and bought a refurb one. In regards to why I took the whole thing apart; I felt the vicegrip method simply looked too heavy-handed, hence my decision to go for the surgeon’s approach.
