Canon USB Protector

By Oleg Mazurov

Canon USB Protector mounted

On my cameras, I use USB port a lot. At home I use various shooting aids (jigs?) and on the road I prefer offloading pictures to the laptop via USB rather than packing a card reader. Out of many cameras I have had over the years, Canon DSLRs have the weakest USB port. I broke it a few times; my 5DM2 was in the repair service twice in one year. When it arrived from the service today, in the box I found a nice Christmas present from Canon (or maybe they are just tired of fixing the same thing over and over again) – a USB protector designed to strengthen the camera’s USB port. The protector installed into terminal area is shown on the title picture (click on it to make it larger) and more details are given below.

The protector is a piece of rather soft plastic made to fit into the terminal well holding on the walls and two other connectors. When installed, A/V and HDMI connectors can’t be accessed. At the same time, the USB connector is supported very well – I’m not expecting it to ever break again. However, since the best protection is achieved when the thing is permanently attached to the camera I need to learn to live without HDMI.

Now, if you ask me where to get one, I don’t have an answer. The following picture shows product label. Google queries of ‘canon cap cable’ and ‘cy3-1673-000’ returned nothing. It seems that the only way to get this protector is to break a USB port (ask me how) and send a camera to Canon for repair around Christmas. I’m going to check that – I have a Rebel XSi with broken USB port which is going to Canon service on Monday :-). Stay tuned,

Oleg.