7 posts tagged “canon”
For a long time, I've been a proponent of refurbished digital products, such as cameras and accessories. My success rate with recertified products has been pretty high. Although everything seems to be built in China, the rehab work appears to be done by U.S. employees, who earn more in a day than a Chinese assembly worker makes in a week.
Here are a few wins and losses:
- Last year, a factory-refurbished Canon Powershot digital camera (A570is) produced "Outer Limits" images, right out of the box. Blurry, jaggy, like a 1960s Zenith TV. Every other Canon camera I've owned -- new, used, whatever -- worked fine. My verdict: damaged in transit. The retailer gave a full refund.
- Kodak's refurbished digital cameras have proven a good deal. Same one-year warranty as a new model. On the other hand, my very recently acquired new M1033 -- a really cool camera -- mysteriously quit after my last national convention. Kodak has a one-year warranty, so assuming you don't dunk it in the Atlantic Ocean, they'll bring it back to life. Or serve up a refurb that will keep me happy.
- My Nikon D50 digital SLR is a factory refurb. It's never let me down. The 55-200mm lens I bought for it quit during a shoot last summer; Nikon replaced it.
- The Fuji F31fd compact digital camera I bought for low-light point-and-shooting is a refurb. It's a winner. I may have landed the last one; Fuji doesn't sell them on their refurb site anymore.
- Olympus FE-290 camera: works fine, but it's nothing extraordinary. A good deal if you want a wide-angle lens in a compact camera.
- Apple iPods: hard to tell. They didn't refurbish my original Gen. 5 iPod, but they sent me a refurbished 30GB iPod that seems to work fine. Verdict: iPods get more abuse than just about any other digital product, so buy the extended warranty.
- Kodak AiO printers: I really like the new printers. Aside from the cool, jet-black makeover they've received, they can read 4GB SDHC memory cards that my old card reader can't. But the refurb I bought from Woot.com arrived with a bad print head. I've replaced the printhead, and it works OK.
(Does it look like Kodak hired Darth Vader to design its new cameras and printers? Very Dark Side, it seems.)
So, my verdict is: big-name manufacturers seem to get refurbishing their products right, most of the time. But I would verify the length of the warranty that the maker offers with the refurb, just in case.
It's time to start divesting. Letting the children go.
I'm starting to sell off some of my collection of cameras. It was fun collecting them in the era when eBay was a big treasure hunt. But, these days, the fees and restrictions and dealing with "will you ship this item to Neptune?" questions has taken all the fun out of eBay.
And, truth is, I'm not shooting much film anymore.
And there are other signs of change. David Ritz used to have camera stores all over the place. Now, there isn't a single one between Buffalo and Syracuse. One in Sarasota just closed. I'm thinking we've made photography as ubiquitous as the pencil (a George Eastman quote) -- but for mostly mixed reasons.
So, if you mosey on over here, you'll find a slow parade of fully functional working collectables under "photo/video". Some are less than a year old. Others, like the Canonet, have appeared in feature films ("Pecker").
My guess is, I'll probably find good homes for a few of these babies. But I won't be opening the Last Camera Store in America, after all.
I wish I hadn't figured this out. But it looks like the truth.
Over-ambitious bloggers are bumping up their hit rates by copying PR material from the camera manufacturers -- or worse, from other sites' ill-informed product reviews.
I don't understand the rationale. If you have something original to add to the world's discourse, I'm all for it. But if the only way you can attract web traffic is by hijacking other people's content, why bother?
It reminds me a bit of the executives who go out and say things like, "We're in this to win." D'uh. What company is in business to tie? Or to lose?
And what's winning, anyway? If you're the best manufacturer of, say, guitars, is your goal to sell the most guitars -- or the best guitars? And if you win, you take market share away from another guitar company. Maybe you do so well that you buy the other company, acquire their brand, fire the U.S. workers, and have the guitars made in Asia with the label of the acquired brand.
Is that winning?
God, I hope not.
Example:
Postscript 1: Vivitar was founded as Ponder & Best, by a couple of California businessmen. They sold some decent aftermarket camera products in the 1970s, including vari-focal lenses and the world's most underrrated rangefinder, the Vivitar 35ES. But they never built their own stuff. Now, Vivitar is owned by a company in Arizona called Syntax-Brillian. That's the company that sources off-brand TVs you may find in Target stores and elsewhere. As a result, I'm pretty certain I'm never going to see a respectable Vivitar photographic product again.
Postscript 2: The camera above is a Vivitar 3800N. It's made in China, comes with a nice zoom lens, and uses film. Takes great pictures. I used it and sold it to a college student. It'll accept just about any Pentax lens you can find. They don't make this camera any more.
Hey, there are a bunch of new digital cameras being introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week! Whoopee!
Here's a brand-new, 2008 model that looks very interesting. High-tech, big, sharp, 12X zoom lens, a minimum of
Yet, there's something oddly familiar about this brand-new camera. Photographic deja vu, if you will. Don't I already own this camera?
Why, yes I do. Sort of.
The model below is my Canon Sureshot AF35ML. Black, sharp lens, compact, few silvery frills. Even has the same basic butch hand grip on the right side of the camera.
Except this one uses film, has no zoom lens, and insists that you look through an optical viewfinder to compose your photos. Still, it's a pretty guy-looking camera design. From July, 1981.
In other words: 26 years later, I can have pretty much the same basic camera that's now locked away in my camera collection vault. Only in digital form, and with a zoom lens. Cool.
Maybe -- as Peter Allen used to say -- everything old is new again.
My luck ran out.
I've had great success buying refurbished digital cameras. Usually, refurbished meant someone had inserted the memory card wrong, or the batteries backwards. The camera didn't work, so they returned it to the store.
Usually.
The following images came from a factory-refurbished Canon A570is camera. They're not edited in any way, just resized for the web. You'll see odd lines running through the pictures. In at least one, there's a bit of red pooling on the blue chairs. The overexposed shots speak for themselves. (Despite what you may have heard, it doesn't snow on a 65-degree day in Rochester, NY.)
These are telltale signs of a bad sensor.
Surprising for Canon, which usually has terrific quality control.
If you get these results right out of the box, race back to your retailer and hand the camera back.
New York City:
After a loooonnng day interviewing famous and semi-famous photographers, I wandered around Times Square to get a few photos. (More on the interviews at a later date. I always aspired to their profession, but less so after hearing 11 of them give their own insights into the business of making and selling photographs.)
Webster, NY:
The Boy Scouts of Troop 113 pitched potential recruits on the benefits of joining their troop. Guess who brought all the flashlights?
Around here:
I just like the details in the glove photo.
Overall impression of the Canon SD1000: a versatile pocket camera, best suited to ample lighting. (The Times Square pictures are rich with the Technicolor sandy noise that's only visible at full-screen resolution.) The Canon's pictures somehow appeared brighter and more vivid on the camera's little view screen than on my big computer monitor.
My very bad habit: an addiction to cameras. Rumor has it that, when I sign onto eBay, the folks in eBay's Master Control shout out, "DAVE!" the way the barflies at Cheers used to shout out, "NORM!"
Most of this month's blog photos have been captured with the following cameras:
Note: don't confuse the A-1 with its near-twin, the WP-1. The A-1 will go underwater to several meters. The WP-1 is water-resistant (think boating or rainshowers), but isn't rated for diving or snorkling.
The Kodak Easyshare C875, made by my employer. A surprisingly strong digital camera; its 2.5-inch LCD screen isn't as sharp or color-accurate as the actual pictures it captures. I thought the images had a bluish cast when I viewed them on the LCD, but when printed or viewed on a computer monitor, the colors are dead-on. They're sharp and detailed, too, which I chalk up to the Schneider glass lens. (This model appears to be one of the last C-series Kodaks to get a Schneider lens, but I haven't seen images from the non-Schneider models yet.) It also uses just two AA-size batteries, making it easier on the pocket. At around $149 online, the 8-megapixel C875 is a terrific bargain. End of shameless plug.
If you have to choose between more megapixels or a great lens, get the camera with the better lens. Megapixels don't mean a great deal. I've seen awful images from 7- and 10-megapixel cameras, and terrific shots from 2- and 4-megapixel cameras. The lens wins, hands down.
Which one should you buy? I'm not impartial, but I'm not biased, either.
In the digital world, I've owned or used Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic, Canon, and Kodak camera. I won't buy Sony because I don't care for the "MemoryStick" card format or Sony's suspect reliability. Until Ricoh imports cameras to the U.S. again, I won't go near them. Olympus and Canon cameras seem best designed for experienced film photographers, re-creating many of the functions from a 35mm SLR. Panasonics have Leica optics and image stabilization that's wonderful, but they're mediocre in low-light conditions. Kodaks are about the easiest to use and take great snapshots. As for Nikons -- gosh, I hated every Coolpix model I tried (all three of them), yet I love the Nikon D50 SLR. They should stick with making great "serious" cameras and steer clear of point-and-shoots.
