My cam seems to be dying

Firstly i want to say hello to everyone, this is my first post. Glad to have you!


I have problem with my Nikon D3100, i will make the story short but feel free to ask any additional questions!

I live at Thailand for 3 years now and since my girlfriend study biology i spend more than half of my time in the nature taking photos! Thai people have special holiday called "Songkran", actually it is their new year, and the tradition is to go outside and splash water on each other. I bet you can guess what happened. Yeah i taped my camera in plastic bag thinking that it will be safe, but after an hour outside water managed to enter inside and camera stopped working. I took out battery immediately, disassembled camera in parts and left in plastic container with silica gel for more than 15 days.After that camera would be working for one day, than other day not and so on. And about a month after the accident everything was fine, it was working without any problems for 4-5 months- until few days ago when strange thing happened.
Firstly display started to blink, than it was black for a while and turned normal. I ignored that! And it happened again, and again.
3 days ago camera died totally, not responding at all, it is not problem with On/off button since there isno green light when inserting battery-NOTHING, i tried different batteries so it is not the battery either. I left camera turned on all the time, today turned alive again for 15 mins and than display was blinking and everything went messed up on the screen, colors, it looked like pixelated psychedelic art. Now i think this camera really really needs replacement, but firstly i want to make sure that there is nothing i can do about it to fix it. The things to be worse, this is actually my girlfriend's camera, we bout this one on credit since we didn't have money after the previous one was stolen on the beach


Ok. now for the solution, anyone can recommend something, any kind of help is appreciated.
I am considering buying a new parts, but firstly i need to know what i need, maybe mainboard? Power board? also i've heard that sometimes internal battery can do things like this.
But since i don't have much experience about cameras pars i need your hep!
Feel free to ask anything!
Thank you
Dejan

Might be worth sending to Nikon for an estimate. You could spend a lot of money on trying to fix it without knowing the exact problem. Expensive lesson

wow, yes, was this salt water? salt water is way worse then fresh water. right when it happens, you sometimes can dry with rice for 24 hours, and then bake at 120 degrees in an oven and it helps dry it out,

but, you have gone more then a week,, so,, it is now dry, so, it might be more.

Nikon can be fickle with repair, I had one dropped in water, and Nikon refused to fix it, so my local Pro shop did the repairs for a few hundred dollars. If you have a decent pro camera repair shop, you could try them, it might just be a control board. Sounds like
your sensor is OK.

anyway,, good luck, you may find it is cheaper to buy a used 3000 then to pay for the service/fix of yours.

No use trying to second guess what the issue might be - you've got water in it and as it's not a weather sealed camera, there's no knowing what lasting damage has been done.
Send it to Nikon for at least an estimate, and then shop around for camera repairers that may do it cheaper.
Having said that, given the current price of the 3100, it may well be more cheaper to get a new body

cnyram said:

Might be worth sending to Nikon for an estimate. You could spend a lot of money on trying to fix it without knowing the exact problem. Expensive lesson

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The thing is that they are sooo expensive when it is about the repair(usually you can buy second hand body for the same price of repair), and the nearest Nikon service is in Bangkok which is very far from me. Also i already opened camera so i am assuming that they will not even want to try to do it.

stmv said:

wow, yes, was this salt water?

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It was not salt water, just normal tap water. But anyway i know how the tap water is quite dangerous too. I was considering washing my camera in distilled water after the accident but due to the availability of distilled water at that time since we were away from town, i just left it like that hoping silica gel will do the job.

SS381 said:

No use trying to second guess what the issue might be - you've got water in it and as it's not a weather sealed camera, there's no knowing what lasting damage has been done.
Send it to Nikon for at least an estimate, and then shop around for camera repairers that may do it cheaper.
Having said that, given the current price of the 3100, it may well be more cheaper to get a new body

Click to expand...

I was thinking of buying replaceable parts since they are much much cheaper that the new body, guessing that i need to change board or something connected to power failure problems.





ONE MORE THING: About the disassembling camera which was really really pain in the ass because of all hidden screws and their difference, i used small containers in which i placed screws along with the small paper message from where it was unscrewed. If you do without that, at the end you can get in trouble when assembling camera!