My Fuji camera shutter button has been sticky for a while. You know when you press the shutter, it usually has two levels of presses.. the half press is for autofocus and the full press is for the actual shot itself. Normally, the press is smooth and you are able to control the shot easily. With a sticky shutter button, it would be a struggle to do the half and full press cos it feels stuck and really hard to press sometimes. As a result of that, your finger would have to exert more pressure and sometimes it goes to a full press immediately without letting you autofocus.
I started noticing the problem when I brought my camera to the beach in Thailand. Since the sand was very fine, I actually saw one of it come inside the shutter button and as far as I can remember, it became sticky shortly after that.
I was thinking that was the problem because obviously it could mess up with the movement since there's a physical obstruction preventing me to press it properly. I have tried blowing the shutter, shaking it, and brushing it upside down to let the sand come off. Nothing helped.
Then I did a research and apparently it is a common problem with Fuji cameras. There have been a lot of different causes for it like sand getting inside, dried salt water or sweat, messed up due to too much pressure with pressing, or just the shutter being fucked due to the top plate's fault and it needing to be replaced.
Well of course the first thing that came to my mind was to bring it to the service center. And when I researched where the nearest service is, it is in Manila and I have to travel by plane to do that. I can also drop it off to a nearby Fuji shop and they can ship it themselves but looking at reviews, some take months for their cameras to be repaired. Eeeeeehhhhhhhhhh. So I just let months go by and wait for it to maybe miraculously turn back to normal. It didn't.
Since I'm traveling soon again, I will be needing my camera. It is almost out of warranty as well so I was just like fuck it I'll figure it out myself. The worst thing I could do if I fuck it up is send it to the service center and pay $100 for the replacement of the top plate. And even so, I'd still have to pay for it regardless of it being in the warranty time since it doesn't cover sand/dust or whatever user error there is.
Upon researching extensively (there's not much info on the internet), apparently WD-40 helps. Some used the lubricant and some used the contact cleaner and they worked just fine.
I chose to buy the WD-40 specialist contact cleaner since as you can see in the close up photo, there seems to be a hard white thing and I figured that might be the cause of it.
It's so disgustingly dirty haha I haven't noticed this before. This might be dried saltwater or my sweat or acid rain or whatever. Since I used it at the beach with wet hands, that really just might be the culprit. Fuji says the X-T4 is weather resistant but I'm not sure to what extent.
First, I gave it a few blows using this enema-looking device just to get rid of whatever dust on the camera.
It says on the label that it's fast drying and specifically for electronics. :D This costs about $9.
I removed the battery before doing this just to be safe. This camera costs almost $2k so I was a bit nervous to directly spray it on the button even though the bottle says it's safe to do so lol.
Bruh it literally dries after maybe 3 seconds so once I sprayed it on the cotton, there was nothing left to transfer to the button lol. I removed some of the cotton so it won't absorb most and I was also able to use the wood stick to clean the hole (where you put the screw or whatever).
After the cotton method didn't really work, I just directly sprayed the cleaner on to the button. It worked quite well although some of the white thing is still visible so I took it upon myself and scratched it very lightly with the blackhead remover hahaha.
I sprayed it quite a few times and blew air on it as well after scraping it.
After careful cleaning, here's the result. It's a lot better than before although there are still a bit white thing left. The pressing improved a LOT. Thankfully my theory of dried saltwater was correct and it wasn't a more complicated problem that I needed to send it to the service center.
Maybe a little bit of WD-40 lubricant will work in the future but since I don't have that at the moment, this thing works anyway. It's not 100% exactly the same as brand new but definitely a lot better than before.
Moving forward, I need to be more careful with using it at the beach or during a rainy weather or even when my hands are sweaty cos that could cause some random stickiness again.
Also, it's my 5th cakeday on Hive today. Wow, 5 years on this amazing community!! <3