bad timing

See that dot on the left side of the head of my new girl? Yeah, it is not suppose to be there. My Canon G10- which I have loved since I got it last December, is making me unhappy. We are thinking (around here) that it is dust on the sensor. The store where I bought it- for full price, I might add- was amazingly unhelpful. Gee, sorry, send it back to Canon. How much? We don’t know. How long? Who knows! Why?! Standard usage- What? This is not a camera that you can open in any way. How can it possibly be my fault?  Anyway- I’m pissed. I will not be buying anything from there again.

This camera thing is incredibly bad timing. Remember this back in March? Well, it is going up next week- August 26. I am nervous and excited. I wanted to give my regular readers a heads up because there will probably be some odd, explaining kinds of blog posts when the video goes up. We’ll see. Of course, now I feel like I am about to have a party or my in-laws over and the vaccuum cleaner is broken!

Also, after sort of limping along all summer, I am getting a rush of ideas- so why does my camera have to break now! Waah! Okay- I think I feel better.

One more thing- I had been hoping to go to the NIADA conference in Tennessee in September. It is now obvious that it is not going to happen. Just wanted to let anyone I’ve talked to about it know.

13 thoughts on “bad timing

  1. i just talked to the canon repair service about one of my friends cameras and they are pretty friendly and helpful… my friend has a g10 as well. i’d recommend calling them up. i didn’t even have to send mine in, they sent me a replacement part for $15. although yours you might have to send it, but it’s worth a call to find out…

  2. :-( I hate it when technical things that I depend on go sour! I hope this is much less of a problem than you dread it might be.
    The doll is charming, Mimi. I was so taken by her that I didn’t notice the spot until you mentioned it.

  3. Hi there,

    I don’t know if this will be helpful or not, but just so you don’t feel like you’ve got a lemon of a deal…
    I worked at a commercial photography studio for years – what you’ve got is definitely dust on the sensor & the problem is absolutely unavoidable. We used to have to clean our digital camera sensor after every big shoot – so sometimes every day. There are tutorials online for how to clean the sensor yourself, but if you damage it your warranty will be void (we went through that once). If you’re careful, cleaning it isn’t that big of a deal. It can take as few as 5 minutes, or up to 2 hours if fate is against you that day. Or you can take it to a local repair shop to clean it – ours charges about $75 each time. But it’s not a defect with the camera. It has to do with the static charge created by the electronics of a digital camera. If you’ve ever changed the lens, you’ve in effect opened the camera and dust will find it’s way in. I have two cameras – one with each lens I prefer to use & then I just don’t take the lens off. (If you do change lenses, turn the camera off first…it may make it a little less likely to attract particles.) If you just have one spot and it’s more toward the edge – just take the spot out in Photoshop. For years I made a living “dust spotting” for a professional photographer that shot out at industrial sights for days at a time and couldn’t stop to clean the sensor. The only way around it was to edit the spots out of each shot.
    Anyway, the problem is very annoying, but really nothing the camera store could have prevented.

    ~ Karen

  4. oops, forgot to give you this link that shows how to make the cleaning tool you would need to do-it-yourself + it talks about the methods of cleaning.

    http://www.cleaningdigitalcameras.com

    Good luck! And I’m sorry if I sounds like a big tech-geek. I’m so far from that, but this just happened to be the one area I knew about. Hope it lessens your frustration a bit to know that everybody with a high-end digital camera goes through it.

    ~ k

  5. Congratulations, Mimi, on the etsy video! Love the image of the in-laws coming for a visit and the vacuum cleaner is on the blink!
    Great info about dust particles and digital cameras from your other reader, Karen Tessandore. Helpful for the rest of us, for sure.
    Congrats again and I look forward to seeing the interview of you in your studio.

  6. Garden Girl is a beauty. I’m sorry I won’t get to meet you at NIADA, but how wonderful that you have so much going on that you can’t take the time out for that! I’ll meet you another time. Surely I will get to Boston again someday–the last time was in 1988 when my son graduated from Boston U. I can’t belive it’s more than 20 years!

  7. If I were you I would check my consumer rights over here in the uk this is something you might be interested in Your agreement is with the retailer, not with the manufacturer.

    Complain to them. If the goods were faulty when you bought them, then the retailer must sort it out for you. If it tries to fob you off telling you to go to the manufacturer, it’s wrong.

    Goods should be of satisfactory quality and as described.
    The Sale of Goods Act 1979 ensures goods should be of satisfactory quality and fit to do the job intended for them.

    Where the goods are faulty, take them back within 6 months and the shop has to prove they WERE NOT faulty when you bought them. After 6 months you must prove they WERE faulty when you bought them.

    By law you have up to six years to make a complaint, but this doesn’t mean goods must last six years, they must last what most people would consider to be a ‘reasonable’ length of time. So if there is wear and tear that breaks the product then the likelihood is you have no claim. Yet if it was an unreasonable fault, you do.

    If there is an argument over whether the goods are faulty or not – the burden of proof is on the consumer, this means that you have to show that your camera does’nt work properly.

    I hope your consumer laws are as good as ours.

    Good luck

    Julie

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