When
I heard the sound – a kind of thunk followed by the
unmistakable noise of a lens cap rolling across the hard
tiles of my office floor – I hoped for the best. It
was like those stages of dealing with one’s own imminent
death from that old Elisabeth Kubler-Ross theory that was
so popular back in the 1970s.
“
Denial” came first. Maybe I really hadn’t really
hit the lens with my elbow and it hadn’t actually fallen
close to a meter to the ground. Next was “anger.” I
was really, really stupid to have the lens sitting on the
desk beside my keyboard, where I could easily hit it and
I deserved
every painful moment of what was happening to me.
After that
there was what Kubler-Ross termes “bargaining.” If
I pick up the lens and discover that there’s nothing
wrong with it, I won’t ever, ever take it out of its
case again, except to attach it to my camera. And I’ll
get a better bag with even softer pockets to hold the lenses.
Then
came “depression.” My lens is probably ruined
and I’ll have to go and buy another one and I can’t
afford that right now. Then, at last I arrived at “acceptance.” Well,
I’d better go and get the camera out of the bag, attach
the lens and see if it still works and then decide what to
do.
It didn’t take long for me to decide, prematurely
as it turned out, that the lens was mortally wounded. At
first
when I attached it nothing happened. Zero. Like the ex-parrot
in the Monty Python skit I seemed to have an ex-lens on my
hands. It was as if it wasn’t attached to the camera
at all. Nothing came up on the screen in the viewfinder.
I tried frantically flicking the little power lever of
the camera on and off, in a desperate attempt to apply electronic
artificial respiration. Slowly, as
I did this (and I have absolutely no idea why) the lens started to give slight
whirring indications that it was coming back to life. I could at least see
through it, although it seemed incapable of auto focus.
Well, I thought, I might be able to live with that. I’ll
just focus manually from now own. But I knew I was kidding
myself. If the auto-focus of the lens
was damaged, who knew what else might be wrong.
So I shot some manual-focus images outside my downstairs
door of the coiled garden hose, leaves of trees, cars on
the street and I took a look at them
on my computer.
They were not only all just a bit unclear -- because, I admit it, I’m
not great at manual focus anymore -- but also overexposed (to use a very
old-fashioned
term). They were, in short, ghastly.
I considered, briefly, that I might take the out-of-warranty
(not that the warranty would have mattered since whatever
had happened was totally
my fault)
lens to
get it repaired. Yeah, right. It was, after all a kit lens, one of the
two that had come with my DSLR body as part of a $1,200 package about
a year
and a half
before. You can now get the same camera and the lenses, if you can still
find the package, for less than $900.
I suspected that paying a technician to take the lens apart
and tell me what key parts of its delicate electronics were
now residing in digital
heaven
would likely cost me more than the lens was worth. After all, friends
who
have taken
digital point-and-shoots in to get them seen to at a camera store,
once they are out of warranty, have simply been told to replace
them. It’s highly
likely that any repair is going to cost you more than the camera is worth, especially
if it’s more than a year old.
Recently, for example, I got an e-mail offer to allow me
to trade in a three-year-old top-of-the-line point and shoot
-- which had cost
$900 new – on a new camera
of the same brand. The amount I would be given for my old camera
as a trade-in? Why a magnificent $50 US.
Imagine my further surprise then (well, perhaps it’s no surprise to you)
when I discovered that the newer replacement for my old kit lens was $330 – far,
far more than I had paid for it as part of the package.
So, there I was, stuck between taking the old, probably
worthless, lens in for repairs and paying for that or shelling
out $330 for
a new lens.
Or I
could go
out and buy a completely new (within the past six months), better-reviewed
DSLR body with a superior kit lens for a total of $980 before
taxes. Or I could shell
out close to $600, again before taxes, for a much faster lens,
perhaps my best option.
(Alternately, I could, I suppose, replace the lens with
a used offering on eBay or Craig’s List, but I have never been a gambler and I don’t
intend to become one now.)
As it turned out, however, the lens miraculously appears
to have healed itself. It has returned to full health and
the
pictures
I get from
it are as good
as anything I used to shoot. Except that I remain fearful
that, at any point, it could go bad again at a critical point.
All of this brought home to me the dilemmas facing camera
owners in the digital era.
Back in the old days, when I and the world were both young,
if you dropped a lens it might be permanently damaged or
it might
not, but
there was
almost certainly
going to be no halfway state. That’s because there
were no tiny internal electronic bits inside the lens that
might, with a couple of shakes and a jolt
of battery power, bring things back to normal, however tentatively.
As
well, there was a good chance you’d (a) bought that
lens as a stand-alone and not part of a kit and (b) that
it was still available at retail at the old
price and hadn’t been replaced by a newer version this
week or (c) it could be repaired for less than you’d
have to pay for a replacement. Heck, there was even a strong
possibility that you could buy a used, refurbished version
of that lens at a camera store.
Well that was then and this
is now. We live in an era where the purchase of a camera,
either DSLR or point-and-shoot
is not much
of an investment,
except
at
the extremely high professional end. You can be almost certain
that within two or three years that camera you lusted after
has become
little more
than an example
of yesterday’s technology and worth less than a tenth
of what you paid for it.
When you replace it, as you inevitably
will, the best you can do will be to pass it on to a friend
or relative (usually
a
child), who might
get
another year or
two of use before either throwing it in the back of a closet
or
taking it to
an electronics recycling depot, if there is such a thing
in their neighbourhood.
Not that digital cameras, especially
at the prosumer level, necessarily die young. My daughter
is now taking excellent
pictures of my
grandchildren with
a three-megapixel
Olympus that passed from a friend of mine to me and from
me to her without so much as a single repair or day out of
service.
I took
it to Europe
with me in
the summer of 2003 and my friend had it for a couple of years
before that so it has to have had six full years of use,
which is an eternity
in digital
camera
terms.
But the fact is that such longevity is unusual, especially
where electronics gear is concerned. A number of studies
have shown
that the average
laptop computer is replaced every three years, and I suspect
(although I have
never seen figures
on this) that the same is true of cameras, now that they
have become just another digital device.
My hope is that sometime
within the next five years the digital camera market will
come to some sort of equilibrium, once
the megapixel race (which constantly
is declared at an end and then resurges again) is finally
over and
every home has gone through at least two generations of cameras.
At
that point cameras would continue to improve technically
(that’s not
going to stop for a long time), but the older ones would
be quite good enough not to become obsolete – even
if only in the minds of their owners. Then people would continue
to use their older cameras without the constant fear that
they were somehow being left behind in the race for improved
images and niftier
camera features.
Better yet, digital cameras and lenses could be repaired
without almost inevitably
resulting in costs that force you to buy a new lens entirely.
Oh, I know, I’m
such a dreamer.
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