Fairphone 2 camera cannot focus

[cowjulie]

I just tried to foam trick: unfortunately did not work for me (also not when I took it out completely).
My camera still will not focus correctly for pictures over 30cm away. I can see the zoom work (goes more and less blurry when I click on the part of the photo I want to have focused), and that in this spectrum I suspect the correct focus level (so this might be the test to realize that the foam trick will not work for the problem?), however it then choses the wrong focus. Same problem for other apps such as Open Camera. Anyone any ideas or same issue?

[olliberti]

Did that trick with dismounting the foam and replace it in the correct posittion. Afterwards the camera did a great job. Very nice!!!

[s99h]

Just wanted to thank you @Npsm and @Jochen17 for your splendid repair tutorial.
My FP2 camera now works like new and focusses everything instantly again.

I’m so happy with the result and shurely will drink a beer on you later this evening!

[codeling]

I just tried the described procedure of opening up the camera module, and my phone can focus very well on near objects (not sure if that has changed, I didn’t extensively test near objects before). The focus on far objects however is still not working. Did anybody else have the issue that the focus only on far objects doesn’t work?

So to be clear, the camera does do some limited focus, just anything further away than 1-2 meters is never in focus, not even with alternative camera apps - I tried with OpenCamera as the CameraMX proposed in another answer is I think not available on F-Droid (using Open OS without google apps here).

Maybe I pressed the foam in too hard for the far focus - does the lens extend or contract for far objects?

[Tomek123]

Thank you

1 year and 2 months i hate the camera - today i love it.

i’ve pushed the foam a little, now the lens has more space

Thomas

[NicoM]

@cowjulie same problem here with different (OpenCamera, stocks app and Camera V5), FP OS, FP OpenOS and Lineage :-/

[cowjulie]

Hi Nico,

I bought a new camera and now it works perfectly again.
@anyone who wants to try their luck on repairing my old one, please send me a message and I’ll mail it over to you. Happy to recycle…

[NicoM]

Oh, ok, no other possibilities

[pwin]

Nice! Thanks a lot for this fix.
My issue was, that the foam wouldn’t stick in place. A tiny part of the square would always slide inside of the circle and stick to the camera. You could easily tell when using the camera app. There was no clicking noise. The clicking only came back after fixing the foam. Unfortunately, this was not a permanent state. Eventually I had to remove the tiny part of the foam (use a sharp knife to cut out a small part, roughly 1 mm) which would always slide back and stick to the cam. This is quite drastic and I was a bit anxious about my decision. However, the cam has been working fine ever since.