I’ve had a Canon PowerShot S60 for several years now, but earlier this year it started exhibiting a purple banding across the top of images. It gradually got worse and worse until the banding was across enough of the picture to screw up the auto-exposure. The width of the purple band depended on what the camera was doing, and made me suspect a power supply / decoupling issue.
Since I was rapidly losing the ability to take decent pictures, I decided to do some research and see if anyone else had had similar problems. Luckily for me, I stumbled upon a significant number of web pages, forum posts and blogs describing a known fault with CCDs that were widely used in consumer digital cameras, and that most of the camera manufacturers had issued recall notices authorising repair free of charge regardless of warranty status.
Canon’s website details a small number of authorised repair centres in the UK.
I chose to send my camera to Colchester Camera Repair Service, after briefly discussing it with them on the phone. They said they were very busy at the moment so their turnaround time was about three weeks, but they confirmed that subject to the issue being the CCD problem the repair would be free of charge.
So I wrapped it up safe and posted it special delivery. That was about three weeks ago, and yesterday it arrived back at my work address. I brought it home today and tested it, just to make sure, and it has indeed been repaired. All it cost me was the cost of sending it special delivery to Colchester.
Kudos to Canon for standing behind their products.