Disassembly - partial opening of Fujifilm X-T30 camera

 This article is a quick glance into Fujifilm X-T30 camera internals.

 One of blog readers Ricardo Zapata asked for hints regarding malfunctioning Fuji X-T30 . Discovering issue remotely is not an easy task, and after few emails we decided to run exploration disassembly. My local discovery effort ended at dismounting bottom plate of X-T30. But Ricardo went much further with disassembly of his Fuji X-T30 camera, including some soldering work. We didn’t localize the problem, though it sounds useful to show you effort details (thank you Ricardo for sharing!).

First you can unscrew two black bolts located under the EVF, and two black bolts at camera sides near strap mount eyelets.

Then continue with bottom plate removal, which is quite easy task. First unscrew three silver bolts on the plate bottom. Skip two bolts near tripod socket, it’s interesting that Fuji designed it to be secured only to bottom plate which is made of thin metal (keep that in mind when mounting X-T30 to tripod with heavy lens mounted, it’s better to use lens tripod collar instead).

Then flip up the screen and unscrew three black bolts (middle one is optional at this step though). Finally unscrew two black bolts at the camera sides near bottom area, and accurately pull out the plate.

WARNING: You may get exposed to electrical shock from camera flash capacitor. It’s recommended to remove camera battery and wait for extended period of time to allow flash condenser to loose it’s charge. I didn’t check that with X-T30 though, so it’s just a theoretical warning based on disassembly of other DSLRs and flash units I did in the past.

Further steps are performed and shared by Ricardo, you need to accurately elevate rear camera plate because there are few ribbon cables that need to be disconnected from main electronic board. 

NOTE: cable that connects LCD is covered with extra layers making it much less flexible, so it’s important to be careful with it and not bend too much and avoid stressing mainboard connector area.

Next step requires unsoldering four cables located near the rear camera dial. Then you need to disconnect all ribbon cables. Finally unscrew all silver bolts holding the main board and flip it to the left so soldered cables in the bottom left corner remain connected but not stressed.

At this point the discovery ended. Ricardo wrote “The last picture, when the main board is removed shows that the next part of disassemble it’s a really hard task, it seems like you may desolder some small electronic components and cable attachments in order to remove the shutter and the sensor, and in comparison with xt2 or xt1 videos it’s seems like Fuji has made it more difficult.“

So he assembled camera back, and everything worked in the same way as prior to assembly. We didn’t solve initial issue but got some interesting insights regarding X-T30 electronics orientation and disassembly steps. Hopefully it may be useful to someone else seeking for steps to replace X-T30 screen, rear plate controls, or some internal components.