Canon S2 IS CCD Repair and IR Mod

By Radu Motisan Posted on March 18th, 2012 , 915 Views (Rate 2.14)

This is not the ordinary point and shoot camera, it offers much more than that, even if it is a relatively old 5MP camera, it still has lots of nice features that make it extremely usable. Unfortunately, following a laser photography session, I accidentally fried the CCD in two spots.
I found a replacement sensor on Ebay, and decided to repair the camera.

Replacing the sensor went straight forward: remove all the screws , take out the case, the motherboard and that's it. The hard part is to put the screws back together, there are like 20-30 small screws of different sizes, so it is imperative you remember the correct position.

The motherboard features the nice Digic 2 processor. Removing the board exposes the CCD.
Taking out the old one, I noticed the IR filter in close proximity of the sensor.
I quickly decided to remove it, and so convert the camera to a IR sensitive device. Using it together with a 720nm filter, or even a 950nm one, will allow me to shoot infrared images.
Currently there's no green vegetation outside (needed to illustrate the IR photography better), as the spring has just began, but I hope to come back with some interesting images soon.
The sensitivity is much better then that of my camcorder set on night vision. Here's how the CCD IR filter looks like:

Putting parts back together was easy, but I misplaced the CCD connector. The result was distorted images:

That was an easy fix. So I correctly connected the CCD and put everything back together.
Shooting the CCD IR filter with this camera through a 720nm filter, shows the CCD IR filter BLACK as it absorbs all IR light:

Here are some unprocessed IR images, more to follow when the environment will provide better content: