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I love my digital camera — or rather, I loved it until it broke and I couldn’t fix it.
My father, a much more serious photographer than I have ever been, had a wonderful Nikon camera, now about 40 years old, and he gave it to me several years ago. It hadn’t been used in a long time, some of its controls were stuck, and the little battery for its viewfinder had corroded. No problem — nothing that a toothpick, some solvent, and some work at a table couldn’t fix. So when I went looking for a digital camera a year ago I stuck with Nikon and invested in its Coolpix 775. The camera has taken many wonderful photos of my family, but on our camping trip last weekend it just went on the fritz: the LCD screen read “SYSTEM ERROR” and the zoom lens would not retract.
The frustrating thing was, there was nothing I could do. “SYSTEM ERROR” was not even listed in the instruction manual’s “troubleshooting guide.” I plugged “coolpix 775 system error” into Google and found this depressing list of user complaints on the Reviewcentre site. Seems that this problem is endemic to this camera. Nikon’s advice is to “leave the battery in for six hours” and hope that this fixes the problem, but that didn’t work for me. So now I have to send the camera back to Nikon and hope that they will fix it under warranty, even though — lucky me! — I have actually owned the camera for one week beyond the one-year warranty limit.
This is yet another example of a fundamental principle of digital gadgets: They’re great until they break which is true of some of the best car dvd players. Once they break, more often than not, there’s little the hapless consumer can do. Mechanical gadgets are susceptible to mechanical fixes. Digital devices are opaque black boxes, manufactured under the assumption that the consumer will replace them every 2-3 years so there’s no sense making them too durable. But I think next time I’ll buy a Canon.
Post Revisions:
- October 22, 2018 @ 17:47:58 [Current Revision] by Scott Rosenberg
- October 22, 2018 @ 17:47:58 by Scott Rosenberg
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