It's been sooo difficult to get my hands on a Canon 5D. Last summer there was that saga of trying to buy one from eBay that ended in a disaster, and almost in tears. After I bought the camera and paid for it immediately, I contacted the seller to ask when he would be posting it and got a reply saying that he will post it later that day. I waited four days over the weekend and it didn't arrive. When I contacted the seller again, he said he'd actually sent it a little later than he'd meant to, but that I should receive it the next day. When the camera didn't arrive even after I had waited two MORE days, he asked me to wait a little longer in case there was "a backlog at the post office" (In a middle of July?). Then a little later when I contacted him again, he said he'd check whether any of the other people he had sold stuff to that week had my camera (Huh?!?). That got my alarm bells really ringing, but I still wanted to believe that he had indeed posted it to me and it would show up. After no sign of it for a further couple of days, he promised a full refund or replacing it with another 5D (As if he'd have the darn things lying around here are there?). Then he asked me to wait a little longer again. Then he started accusing me of having actually received it and that I was lying when I said I didn't have it (I'm still not 100% sure whether he was trying to pull a fast one or whether he was actually really that stupid that he didn't send it registered mail! It would have cost him a whole 70 p more!). Then, when I said I was going to raise a PayPal dispute, he came up with a sob story of single-handedly looking after small kids and not having money, not being able to sleep because of all this etc. He said he'd refund me £200 out of the goodness of his heart (!). I didn't accept that. A couple of weeks later PayPal solved the case in my favour, but only refunded me £150 of the £800 I had paid for the camera. After a long battle, my credit card company came to the rescue and I got the rest of the money back through them. Phew. (Since then, PayPal have changed their policy and they actually guarantee full refund in cases like this nowadays.)
All that saga over, then there's me deciding to go to New York to buy the new 5D Mk II... Turns out here was a delay with the release of the camera and anyway it was (and still is!) so popular that many retailers had back-orders stretching to January, so there was no way for me to get my mitts on one while in New York. Oh well, we had a great week in New York nevertheless. But I came back without a new camera.
I ordered one here in the UK some time ago from play.com. They had advertised that they will get a new shipment of them on [I'll have to check when], but the date came and went and there was no sign of it, while the status of the camera had changed to 'no stock' on their web site. I cancelled the play.com order yesterday and ordered one from LambdaTek, as their status said that they had 11 in stock. Well, I got an e-mail from their sales team saying that they don't actually have them at the moment and that they are expecting next shipment from Canon on the 15th January. So I thought I'll have to wait until then. Then, to my huge surprise, I received an e-mail today saying that my camera has been dispatched! And lo and behold, I received it today! I can't believe it. I still can't believe it. It must be faulty or something, I'm sure. It can't be real.
Anyway, well, it looks like it can take photos. And video films! As you can see, my favourite model helped me test it.
The above was taken with ISO 1600. The image quality is a little noisier than I was hoping it to be, but to be fair, there's hardly any chroma noise. Here's a 100% crop to show the noise: (click to see it full size)
And this is what Zebedee was doing earlier today. Playing with ice. On ice.
Can't wait to take my new camera out tomorrow to test it in daylight!
No comments:
Post a Comment