So there I stood, professional photojournalist, in line at Best Buy trying to return an iPod case, and in front of me stood a mom, her young child, and her husband the weekend after Christmas. She had a new Canon Rebel XSI in her hands (which I had been looking at to buy for myself) and I couldn’t help but wonder what was wrong with it, what fatal flaw did this shiny new camera have? I thought to ask her, but she was called to the counter before I could.
There she started to go on about how the camera just didn’t work. Nothing she did would work (and she was really good with electronics too, or so she said). The sales representative opened the box and took out the camera body with the cap still on it, but with no lenses attached. He took the cap off the body and proceeded to turn the camera on and try to take pictures. “Is it charged?” he asked, “Is the memory card in the camera?” to which she maintained a baffled expression saying the words, “The instructions didn’t help all!” Before I died of internal laughter I tried to say something to the women and employee. All I got out was “Hi, I’m a photog…” when she cut me off “You don’t know anything about this!”
Fine! I thought she could just go ahead and ruin a perfectly good camera by flinging it around without a lens on. Then I felt bad; in the line she was telling her husband that it wasn’t his fault he bought her a broken camera, he got the best one on the market and that’s all that matters. I felt bad because that lady had no idea what it means that her camera was “the best on the market” (which it isn’t). All her husband saw when he bought it was OOO! 12.2 mega pixels. Fast 9-point AF system! He has no way of knowing that he doesn’t need all that in a camera, and neither does his wife. They couldn’t even put the lens on for goodness' sake!
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Article comments
1 - Brian aka Guppusmaximus
Nice Article...
I bought a 7.2 Megapixel Sony Cyber-Shot because I thought I was going to love taking pictures. Turns out, I would prefer taking video and the Cyber-Shot is almost okay for casual stuff but I wanna get serious. So, it looks like I am going to be purchasing a digital video-cam.
Anyways, my point, I know what you mean. That lady was probably only going to take pictures of her cat never mind being concerned with an accurate preview of framing close to the moment of exposure.