Ted’s (Excellent?) Adventures

A long time ago, Paul Simon wrote a song with the line, “I got a Nikon camera” in it.  Well, I won’t ever hear that song the same way.

In the first part of our trip, I used a Canon S3, with pretty good results.  For Christmas, though, my big “gift” was a Nikon D40X high-end camera.  Not quite an SLR, but a bigger digital camera with multiple detachable lenses, including a powerful zoom lens.  I thought it would be worth the extra weight to have that kind of camera on the part of our trip that includes safaris in Africa.

I have been using the Nikon D40XS cameras (yes, sadly, plural, not singular) since the beginning of January, and it has taken great pictures.  Last week, though, I reported on the dreaded error message I got — “Error:  Press shutter release button again.”  Translation in the User’s Manuel — “You’fe totally hosed.”  The camera completely stopped functioning after we were just two days into our Antarctic Expedition.

But temporary good luck arrived.  The one town we visited on ou4 2 1/2 week Antarctic trip was a small town called Stanley, the capital of the Falklands.  Only one store there carries cameras, and they had three good cameras for sale.  One was a high-end Canon Rebel, but of course the size of lenses for it is incompatible with my expensive Nikon lenses.  And they didn’t carry any Canon bigger lenses, so that was a no go.  The second model was a Panasonic , which looked inferior to my old Canon, so I ruled that out.  BUt I was in “luck.”  They had the exact Nikon D40X that had just broken for me.

So I rationalized my way into buying yet another Nikon camera.  I said, “How likely is a second one to break again?”  And I said, “Boy, it just can’t break again in a matter of days.”  But, yesterday, I learned my Nikon lesson the hard way.  My six-day-old Nikon D40X also broke, frozen on a command requiring me to set the time zone for the camera.  I’ve tried every reset command that exists, and nothing brings the camera back to life.

So I’m looking for a great big box, and I’m going to ship all of my Nikon camera equipment back to the factory.  It was a very expensive misfire, and I’m now left in the Antarctic with a very basic point and click.  When I get back to civilization, I’ll buy yet another new camera, but would never buy another Nikon.  Hard to believe I could go through two Nikons in seven weeks!  Ouch!!!!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 3:34 am and is filed under About Us and This Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.