The LCD hinge cover serves a vital purpose: it protects the LCD ribbon cable from the damages of every day use.

In order to implement a rotating variable angle LCD display into a camera, the LCD needs to be separate from the camera body and be designed as an extremity. In this case, a ribbon cable must be used to pass a real-time low latency display output to the LCD.

As you can imagine, the protection of this ribbon cable is paramount to a reliable user interface and continued operation of the camera. So when I found out that I could not buy a replacement hinge cover for my camera, I was quite frustrated.