How to save a drowned camera — first aid | Articles | Photo, video, optics

Many man­u­fac­tur­ers of pho­to­graph­ic equip­ment pro­duce cam­eras that are not afraid of water and can even work sub­merged. How­ev­er, not all users will find them suit­able for price or per­for­mance, and it may hap­pen that a reg­u­lar cam­era acci­den­tal­ly ends up under water. Let’s say you dropped the cam­era under water, or water got inside for some oth­er rea­son. What to do in this case?

First, you need to pow­er off the cam­era. How? You need to remove all the bat­ter­ies and accu­mu­la­tors that are in it. This is nec­es­sary so that a short cir­cuit of the inter­nal elec­tron­ics does not occur.

Next, you need to clean the cam­era with an absorbent cloth.

If the cam­era has fall­en into salty or dirty water, it is worth doing this espe­cial­ly care­ful­ly. The optics can be cleaned with clean, ide­al­ly dis­tilled water, and cot­ton swabs and lint-free wipes.

After clean­ing, leave the cham­ber to dry. To avoid cor­ro­sion, you need to speed up this process. How? Of course, you should not heat it or do some­thing like that. It is nec­es­sary to put the cam­era in some kind of con­tain­er or box with sil­i­ca gel bags, which comes in pack­ages of new elec­tron­ic equip­ment, but do not close this con­tain­er her­met­i­cal­ly, oth­er­wise a large amount of mois­ture will not evap­o­rate.

Next, you should wait a few days and only after that put the bat­tery in and turn on the cam­era. As prac­tice shows, in a large num­ber of cas­es the cam­era will work fine.