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December 16, 2009
My Malfunctioning Digital Camera Saga
As all of you who read this blog know, I love to take photos. Lots of them, generally. So you can all imagine how irritating it's been to have not had a well-functioning camera for three and a half months.
I own a Canon PowerShot S5 IS, which I purchased back in spring 2008 for about $300 (maybe a little more, I forget). My camera's problems started suddenly back in the beginning of September this year. I was at the meteo grad tailgate before Penn State's football season opener vs Akron, when the first picture I took that day had a horrible exposure problem -- almost everything in the photo was bright white. The exposure problem seemed to go away after taking a photo of the ground, at least until I turned the camera off and then on again. That was annoying and puzzling enough, but then I discovered that my photos from that day forward all had some horizontal banding on them.
This problem steadily worsened through September and October. The banding was getting more and more noticeable, and the "trick" of taking a picture of a darker scene to effectively reset the exposure (or to "hide the decline" of my camera's performance) was no longer working reliably (or often, or at all, eventually). I got really frustrated with my camera's performance in mid-October, when I went on a hike in the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon, when I took a bunch of pictures of the historic October snowstorm in State College, at the PSU-Minnesota football game, and then a couple pictures that I tried to take when I visited Alex at Michigan. My camera was taking such poor photos, every single one ruined with noticeable banding, and most of them with overexposure issues (often manifesting itself as something like a "feather-focus" if it didn't wash everything out), that it was like I didn't have a camera at all. Here's a sample of some of what my camera was doing (unfortunately I deleted some of the worst examples before I sent in my camera):
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After searching and posting in some online forums, I brought my camera into Geek Squad at the local Best Buy here in State College on Halloween. I described the problem to them, and they shipped it out to whatever camera repair company they outsource. The camera repair company diagnosed the problem, and said they were going to "replace the contact and all associated connections." Whatever that means. I figured they knew what they were doing, so I approved the $84 repair. I was hopeful that I'd get the camera back in time for my trip to Washington state, and even called Best Buy the night before I left town, because I knew it was en route. The Best Buy guy said it'd been sitting in Harrisburg for a couple days already and so *should* be delivered first thing in the morning, but he couldn't make any guarantees. So I stopped by Best Buy the next day (17 Nov) around noon on my way out of State College, but it still wasn't there. It was still sitting in Harrisburg, for some unknown reason. ARGH!! Good thing I didn't take up their offer of waiting around until the afternoon shipment came in to see if it'd arrive, because it didn't arrive at the State College Best Buy until after I arrived in Washington. Sigh. That has to be about the longest a shipment has ever taken to go from Harrisburg to State College, at least since the advent of motorized vehicles. Fortunately my brother Nathan loaned me his small Canon A-series point-and-shoot camera by sending it out with Jake on his visit to PA, so that I could at least have a camera on my trip if mine wasn't ready in time.
So when I rolled back into State College after my Washington/Thanksgiving trip on the night of 29 Nov, before I even went back to my apartment, I stopped by Best Buy to pick up my camera. But since I didn't have my batteries or memory card with me, I didn't test the camera at the store. I took a couple pictures that night in my apartment, and at least on the camera LCD, it seemed okay. One morning later that week, however, there was a cool scene outside that I wanted to photograph, and with the first picture I took, the same exact problem as before manifested itself. Over-exposure and banding. ARGH. Despite having been charged $84 and told it was fixed, my camera wasn't fixed.
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Over the next couple days I took several more photos in various lighting conditions with various camera settings to document the problem more fully. If anything, the banding issue was worse. I also discovered that the bands are located in the same positions on each photo, which made me pretty convinced that it was a problem with the CCD. When I brought my camera back to Best Buy on 5 Dec, I brought along my laptop so that I could show plenty of "before" and "after" pictures, to prove that the "repair" that I paid for had done absolutely nothing. The Geek Squad employee remembered me from when I checked out my camera six days earlier, and did everything he could to help me, including shipping it out by 2nd-day air instead of standard ground to expedite the new repairs. He said he'd personally fill out the paperwork to tell the camera repair company that I would not be paying anything for this second repair, and that they'd better actually fix it this time. He said the repair company needed to "own" this repair, and that I absolutely shouldn't have to pay anything more (also because he said Best Buy obviously doesn't want angry customers).
I was really beginning to wonder what was going on with my camera because I hadn't gotten a call asking me to approve a repair or anything like that. I was starting to lose hope that I'd get it back before I leave for Christmas break on Monday 21 Dec. This morning, however, I got a robo-call from Geek Squad informing me that my camera has been repaired, shipped, and is now ready for pick-up at the State College Best Buy. I was pleasantly surprised it was back already. This time I made sure I tested the camera plenty before I leave the store, and verified that it didn't have any problems. Because the easiest way to verify if the camera was fixed or not was to take some photos outdoors during the daytime (that's when the banding and overexposure was most prevalent and noticeable), I thought that was a plenty good reason to take off from work early today (as a reward for making it through yet another IPR).
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So far, so good, it appears. I'll be testing it plenty more and putting it through its paces in the next few days though, just to make sure that it really is fixed (and to make up for lost time!). I really wish they would've replaced the CCD the first time around, but oh well, it seems to work correctly now. I'm just excited to have a working camera for the first time in three and a half months, and just in time for Christmas break!
Posted by Jared at December 16, 2009 06:04 PM