Samsung NX30 dial repair

I recently bought a used NX30 from eBay. It was a little beat up, but sold as working. Sadly, once I started using it, the command dial broke. It would still register steps, but with a seemingly random direction.

Problems with the dial seem rather common with the NX30, and all NX cameras, so I decided to fix the problem myself and document the process with this post. An official service manual is available for this camera, but it doesn’t show the whole process and I think it even has one mistake concerning screw types.

Tools & screws

The repair is not tool intensive, you’ll need just a Philips PH00 screwdriver with a skinny shaft (interchangeable bits won’t do, sadly) and something to clean the rotary encoder with. Ideally you’d get some contact spray, but I didn’t want to wait and used ethanol.

You’ll encounter a few types of (rather similar-looking) screws. I’ll label them S1, S2 and S3:

• S1: Fine-pitch screw into metal, highlighted in blue
• S2: Coarse-pitch screw into plastic, highlighted in red
• S3: Longer coarse-pitch screw into plastic, highlighted in green

I recommend keeping these in three separate containers. Don’t be like me and don’t lose any :)

I recommend the usual precautions: Be grounded, do this in a clean environment, and when putting in screws into plastic (S2 and S3), don’t push on them, they’re easy to cross-thread.

Disassembly

First, take out the battery. You can then proceed to take out the required exterior screws:

Now pull off the back cover (including LCD and controls) to uncover the internals. There you’ll have to take out two recessed screws above the PCB. They’re hard to find, but shouldn’t be too hard to get at with the right screw driver:

After this, the front grip should be loose; remove it from the body by unplugging the flat-flex cable:

The grip along with the body

The dial assembly is composed of two parts: The dial itself in a plastic package, coupled to a rotary encoder on a flex PCB. Detach the PCB by unscrewing two screws and disconnecting the other end of the flex PCB:

Inside of the grip

You can now detach the PCB and safely clean the rotary encoder. I put it in a small bath of technical ethanol and then spun its core around to make sure the liquid got everywhere. A Torx screwdriver works well as a makeshift shaft.

Now all that’s left is to put the camera back together and hope the cleaning worked!

Notes

This kind of cleaning isn’t guaranteed to work, so now having seen the rotary encoder, I tried to find replacement parts. As it turns out, this encoder (or a functionally identical model) is still produced by ALPS as the ALPS EC05E1220401. You can find it at various suppliers for a dollar or two. I’ll certainly add one to my next order.

I also took a look at the mode dial (which sadly requires a much more annoying disassembly process). The part looks to be the Shinmei SSS-60MD-10A-1-T20, which I sadly only found for sale on eBay and Aliexpress in bulk.

And if you want them, I’m also publishing the unannotated photos of the disassembly.