New Camera, Part 1 (The Bad Part)

My old Canon Rebel 2000 inexplicably died at some point in the past year. I hadn't taken it out much, mostly because buying and printing film, especially given my proclivity for shooting a lot of film at a time, was just going to be too expensive. When I finally did go to start it up with a new set of batteries, it didn't turn on. When I took it in to a camera store for repair, it was going to cost me as much to fix it as to replace it with a new version of the same camera. With some money I'd received during the holidays (and in advance for my birthday), I decided to upgrade to a decent DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex). After a lot of research, I determined that the Canon XSi was the camera for me.

This is not a cheap camera. It is not a professional camera, no 5D or whatnot. But it would do what I wanted - give me a reasonable amount of control of my photographing process, let me use my old lenses (an f/1.8 50mm and an f/4.5-5.6 55-200mm), and have enough of a megapixel count to let me blow up the photos to a nice size (we hang some of my better work around the house).

The camera was not inexpensive, so I looked around for the best deal. Here's where the problem starts. I found the camera for $475, body only, at US1Photo. After ordering it, I received a phone call from Ken to upsell. That means that he tried to get me, quite rudely, to purchase additional accessories over the phone. When I kept saying that I didn't want anything else, he went so far as to raise his voice to me and accusingly say, "That's a great deal" (it wasn't). I wanted an extra battery anyway, so when he further lowered the price on one, I finally agreed to include it. He also offered to speed up the shipping on the camera for free. The experience was obnoxious, but I didn't anticipate anything particularly wrong.

When I received the camera, I didn't have a line-item receipt. Instead, the entire purchase, tax included, had been grouped under a heading of "Executive Package." Shady dealings #2.

When I turned on the camera to do the initial format of my new memory card, it wouldn't work. The camera turned on just fine, but it wouldn't interact with the memory card. OK, I thought, perhaps the card is bad. Tried a new card. Same problem. Tried both cards in another digital camera. Both worked.

Knowing that some cameras will come off the line with problems, I called Canon Tech Help to see if they could offer any. Troy ran me through a number of potential fixes, none of which worked. He took the serial number so that I could send the camera in for repair. He then told me his computer has crashed, and he would be back in a moment after restarting.

He came back to tell me his computer had not, in fact, crashed. Rather, my serial number was already in the system under another name, and he had to see if he was allowed to tell me this. I was infuriated. I'd been sold a used camera, one that likely had been returned for the very problem I was experiencing.

When I called US1Photo to ask how to get my camera replaced with one that worked, I got the runaround for several minutes as Kevin tried to insist that whatever had gone wrong was my fault. Maybe I bent the pins in the camera by forcing the memory card in, he said. I was having none of it, and told him that I wanted them to replace the camera. He told me to call back on Monday (this was a Friday), and we'd work it out. When I called back, he again tried to get me to send the camera in to Canon, implying that I'd done something wrong. When I confronted him with the information that Canon already had the camera registered, he told me, "We sometimes register the camera for the customer." When I told him it was under someone else's name, it was the first time in two days that he hadn't tried to cut me off mid-sentence. He finally acquiesced, gave me a code to put on the box when I sent it back, and hung up abruptly.

I ended up getting a replacement camera. It works just fine. I've taken a few pictures with it that I'll post tomorrow. I'm calling Canon shortly to make sure this one hasn't been registered with them yet. So the story ends on a somewhat happy note. Given my experience, however, I highly recommend that you do NOT use US1Photo for your camera needs.

Pardon the long post. I've been pissed.