Carena DF-300 Capacitor Repair

Last night I soldered a new capacitor into my Carena DF-300 and now it works perfectly! There was a known capacitor issue in the Minolta X-300/X-370 cameras where a cheaper capacitor was used and it goes bad a lot of the times. This Carena DF-300 is a fully licensed copy of the Minolta X-300 and it was made in China, so this fix applies to the X-300/X-370 in general.

To describe the capacitor issue, I've found that if the camera has fresh batteries, you turn on the camera and use the self-timer mode. If the light on the front of the self-timer flashes properly and then the camera just does nothing after 10 seconds, this indicates the capacitor is bad and needs replacing. This has always been the case for me, because I have about 17 of these Minolta cameras and licensed copies and a half-dozen or so has needed a new capacitor.

The white arrow points to the area where the capacitor is. Between the base plate and the bottom of the camera, you can see one of the new, thinner capacitors and the older, fatter one I replaced. Hope this helps everybody out there who wants to fix their cameras. It's really not that hard of a job to do. I also want to point out that it seems you need to put the new capacitor in in a certain way. Along one side of the capacitor seems to be arrow point down. These need to go to the right side as show in the picture above - to the outer edge of the camera. I'm not sure if this makes a difference, but I must have got a few installed backwards and when I refixed them, keeping the arrows to the correct side, this has solved the problem. Your mileage may vary, of course.

As an additional aid, to take off the base plate, there are four tiny screws that hold it on. Two longer ones on each end and two shorter ones toward the middle. I've found that the two longer ones are usually the hardest to get loose, while the two shorter ones come out real easy. And that's all there is to getting into where the capacitor is located.