3 days ago my lens was replace, now it's scratched again!

I am sorry for you Dave. I have scratched lens too. I even ordered replacement part from Hong Kong.

I AM VERY VERY SURPRISED THAT AAS HAVE NOT WROTE ABOUT THIS ISSUE ON THEIR FRONT PAGE. :icon13:

Seriously editors, please stop that brown tongue thing with Nokia. :viking:

Dave, I replaced my own lens cover with a spare I bought online and like you noticed the re-occurrence of scratches after less than week.

Yet some N97 owners claim to have no scratches and also use the camera frequently? I can only hope there is a 'bad batch' of lens cover components, but your recent experience with a Nokia care point leads me to believe this is not the case, and in fact, there is a very low number of 'good' ones that for whatever reason (manufactured to greater tolerances, etc.) don't have the problem.

I have bought another spare cover (same design) to swap in when my current one gets too scratched to be practical. But I (and everyone else) should NOT NEED TO DO THIS!

Also, check out this new N-series device...

http://thesymbianblog.com/2009/08/08/leaked-images-of-nokias-new-internet-tablet/

Now why does the lens cover have a groove on one side I wonder... this is what the N97 should have had - to avoid having you push down on the middle to move it and force the slider onto the plastic over the lens 😡

hey dave

what exactly did they replace as a matter of interest ? Just the lense ? Did they replace the slidey lense cover too ? Or did they replace the whole camera

I don't know what they replaced on Dave's phone, but you can buy the whole slidy lens cover unit as a single part:

http://cnn.cn/shop/nokia-black-camera-lens-cover-p-6118.html

Hih wrote:I AM VERY VERY SURPRISED THAT AAS HAVE NOT WROTE ABOUT THIS ISSUE ON THEIR FRONT PAGE. :icon13:

Yeah, me too.

I guess they are taking a leaf out of Nokia's book - if you ignore a problem it will go away. Either that or they don't want to rock the boat with Nokia?

celios wrote:Yeah, me too.

I guess they are taking a leaf out of Nokia's book - if you ignore a problem it will go away. Either that or they don't want to rock the boat with Nokia?

I am with you mate. I have pretty long Nokia phone history myself, starting from 2110/7650 lol.

Something is just wrong with ASS nowadays.

my thinking with respect to the lense scratching is that there may have been a batch of faulty lense covers, in which case, if they replaced daves lense but kept the old lense cover then of course the problem would reoccur.

angiepea wrote:my thinking with respect to the lense scratching is that there may have been a batch of faulty lense covers, in which case, if they replaced daves lense but kept the old lense cover then of course the problem would reoccur.

I think they will have replaced the whole thing, with the plastic that goes over the lens, the sliding part with Carl Zeiss written on, etc. as it's fiddly to disassemble any further and easy to break when you're doing so.

Pretty sure it was the whole lens assembly. I'll take it back again next week...

I carefully examined the lens of my camera with a loop and even if so far the quality of pictures has'nt been impaired I think I can detect two little scratches between the leds of the flash and the lens itself.
When I phoned to Nokia hot line (Denmark) the employee told methat if I would send it in for repair the cover (or maybe just part of it) will be substituted with the one from the N86.
I will do that as soon as I'll be back from holidays (Sept. 1th).
I just want to ask to those who bought a new camera cover why did'nt they buy the one of the n86?
The guy in Nokia hot line said that they are exactly the same but the one from the N97 is blue and flat while the one from the N86 is yellow and curved so as not to scrach the glass in top of the lens.

I think that if you are gonna send your N97 in for repairs you should insist to have the faulty blue plastic cover replaced with the yellow one.
Anyway , when I'll get my phone back from nokia Ill see what they managed to do.

plexus wrote:I just want to ask to those who bought a new camera cover why did'nt they buy the one of the n86?
The guy in Nokia hot line said that they are exactly the same but the one from the N97 is blue and flat while the one from the N86 is yellow and curved so as not to scrach the glass in top of the lens.

Yes, I wish I could buy the N86 cover. It does not seem to be available for sale anywhere online and Nokia UK Care Points refuse to sell parts to customers.

What Nokia need to do is start replacing the N97 covers with N86 ones without waiting for the customer to 'demand' this.

celios wrote:Now why does the lens cover have a groove on one side I wonder... this is what the N97 should have had - to avoid having you push down on the middle to move it and force the slider onto the plastic over the lens 😡

Exactly how hard are you pushing down on your lens cover? I've never had to put any downwards pressure on mine to open it, just put finger on it and then swipe it sideways.

My white NAM version has a scratch between the lense apperture and the LED and I haven't had any trouble with photos, BUT...

Since Plexus said that he had looked at his lense with a loupe I thought I should take the trouble to look at mine (after all what's the good of having a loupe if you don't use it every now and then?).

It turns out that I have FOUR (4) scratches in the direction of the slide--the major deep one being between the apperture and the LED, the other three are from the middle of the apperture to nearly the edge and are very, very fine so that you would have difficulty seeing them with the naked eye.

THUS...it appears that the little metal tab under the slide which is doing the scratching (revealed by a brave soul on another board who disassembled his slide cover) is positioned in such a way that it may just be a matter of time for those of us with still-usable N97's to suffer the degradation.

MAJOR design flaw in this cover Nokia!!!

Mine too has scratches, and I have part dismantled mine ready for my replacement from cnn to arrive.

My local Nokia parts supplier is currently out of stock of the N86 camera slider, but as soon as they get stock, i will be buying one, and attempting to fit the N86 camera cover to my N97, but in the meantime, when my N97 camera cover replacement arrives, i will be dismantling it, and sanding down 1mm of the magnet side of my old removed blue part, and fitting it to my new cover to see if that resolves the issue too.

We really should not have to go to these lengths with a �500 device, but waiting for Nokia to do something other than just replace the handset with another N97 with the same faults is pointless, and a complete waste of their time, our time, and of course, money.

Wow Micky!
I wish I could be as crafty as you are.
I think that if you would like to earn yourself the eternal gratitude of us afflicted N97 users and maybe a place in paradise too, you could post a step by step guide on how to fix the nasty, scratchin' blue SOB and the problems it causes.
Your idea of sandpapering a mm of blue plastic off sounds like one of those simple remedies that just might work.
I would try it myself , but Im afraid to cause even more damage and voiding the guarantee at the same time.
How comes nobody tried such a simple solution yet?