I’ve recently been on a bit of a repair kick and wanted to tell another fun repair story. I promise my blog isn’t becoming dedicated just to fixing electronics. This was an interesting story as far as parts sourcing goes though, so I thought it would be a cool one to share. Plus, you’ll get to learn how focus control works on webcams with autofocus.
I found a really good deal on eBay for two “for parts or not working” Razer Kiyo Pro webcams. These are pretty decent 1080p60 cameras with autofocus and nice image quality. Here’s the item description:
Web cam has been tested and does not power on
It looked like they were both returns to Amazon or a similar retailer, and surprise surprise, the description was completely wrong. They both powered on just fine.
One of them seemed to work great, and the other one was way out of focus and didn’t respond to any focus control commands at all. These cameras support manual and automatic focus control through software, but I just couldn’t get it to work at all on the faulty one.
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