How The Wind Got Us A New Camera
January 25th, 2009
A little while back, Terah was leaving the house one morning. On that particular morning, we had an unusually intense — even for Kansas — wind. It caught the storm door and whipped it around with such force that it bent the metal arm that goes into the pneumatic plunger, and even bent the bracket that the arm connects to. It was not possible to un-bend either of them with household tools, even with dad’s help.
So I went to the hardware store and picked up a replacement. But I had been putting off actually replacing it because, well, the door almost closed automatically and there were more important things to get to.
Until yesterday. I got out the tools and went to work. Jacob was around and took an interest in the activity. I was stretched out on the floor on my stomach working with the drill to try to get out some extremely tight screws without stripping them. And Jacob, at one point, got down on the floor on his stomach right beside me, and proudly announced “I (am) like dad!”
Terah was working on something nearby, and noticed this, and went for the camera. Unfortunately, I had left its CF card in my digital audio recorder. She found the other card, and was hurrying to put it in so she could get the cute picture. Even more unfortunately, she inserted it sideways.
CF slots have 50 tiny pins in the space of 1.7 inches. The slots normally force the card to align properly, but not when the card is put in sideways. It slid back and bent a pin back. The slot is thus unusable.
I was going in to town anyway to pick up my bike from the bike shop, so I stopped at Moler’s Camera on the way. This is my favorite camera shop — it’s the sort of place where you take a seat at the counter while they help you. I showed the sales guy the camera and he knew off the top of his head that the cost to fix it is $206. Which is pretty much in line with reports on the Internet.
The old camera is a Canon Digital Rebel XTi (EOS 400D). It’s over 2 years old, so out of warranty, but I wasn’t planning to upgrade soon. On the other hand, the camera shop estimated that they could buy the XTi from me for about $150 to $200, considering its condition, and a new XSi (EOS 450D) is $570 at B&H. So about $200 to fix the old one, or about $400 cost to us to get a new one — and the next model up, which uses SD instead CF, and thus will never have a bent pin again. With that kind of cost, we decided to spring for the XSi. Plus, it would take about a month to get the repair on the XTi.
So there you have it. The wind can be expensive and cause camera upgrades.
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I just purchased the the same camera (from my local camera shop). I’m having fun learning how to use it.
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