Repairing an "unrepairable" camera lens myself

While I was on holiday with my in-laws, the lens mount on my mother-in-law’s camera broke. The lens costs around €400 and with only a small part of the plastic mount place broken, I assumed a simple repair was possible.

She went to a good camera shop where she bought the camera and lenses, asking if they could repair this. They said it couldn't be fixed. Fujifilm doesn't provide replacement parts for the lenses and the only option was to discard the lens and buy a new one for €400.

While a couple of weeks passed since I saw the broken lens mount plate, I did remember it having a couple of visible screws. So I started looking into buying the mount plate online. No official retailers had them and I checked AliExpress. There I found multiple options: the first one is a "official" mount-plate fully plastic without any other components on them, the second one did have the connectors and a ribbon cable that attaches to the lens PCB. the first one cost about €8 and the second one €24.

I spent some time figuring out if this repair was doable by a random guy with some small screw drivers. A couple of forum posts suggested others have done this, but for the smaller lens with less electronics. I also found a video on someone doing the repair in 30 minutes with just the plastic mount plate so a big portion of time went into decoupling the connector plate and placing it back perfectly.

I took the middle ground and bought the plate with connectors already installed, it costs a bit more but having to do surgery on the lens while it's collecting dust and possible scratches made me uncomfortable. So after the package arrived, my in-laws came to our house and while they were enjoying a nice cup of coffee, discussing the holiday plans, I started the repair. All it took was removing 4 screws (bit smaller than the bit I had, but it worked), remove the ribbon cable, struggle a couple of minutes to put the new ribbon cable back and fasten the screws. I did touch the lens with my finger in the process, resulting in a visible mark on the pictures. But having the picture was amazing, and the auto-focus, zoom was still working. My mother-in-law will take the lens to a cleaning professional (she occasionally does this anyway) and then the lens is back as new.

All it took was 8 minutes of my time and finding the correct mount-plate and this saved at least 350 euros and a perfectly good lens in the landfill. To me this was a new experience to work on cameras. But I already have done quite some repairs on my Roborock S5 vacuum robot using the available parts on various sites. It always feels wrong to throw away a good product just because a small part isn't working anymore. This experience reminded me that small repairs can save significant costs and reduce waste.