Last weekend I was shooting some action shots at the Barclaycard Freerun Zone at the Thames Festival. The guys who were doing the freeruning moved like lightning and the 9 FPS speed of the D3 came in handy when trying to keep up with them.
After I used up all the room on my Sandisk Extreme IV 8GB card, I switched over to the backup Extreme III 4GB cards. The speed in writing images to the cards was painfully slow compared the faster Extreme IV. It made me want to do a little research into which cards have the best write times. After a bit of digging I found this handy Compact Flash card speed database by Rob Galbraith - it shows the write times for a selection of cards being used by different cameras.
Polaroid, famed for the chunky instant cameras of the seventies and eighties is launching a new product which brings the idea of instant prints into the digital age.
The Polaroid PoGo is a digital photo printer roughly the same size as a mobile phone which is capable of printing a 2"x 3" sticky-backed, high quality & fade resistant photographs wirelessly straight from a compatible mobile phone using bluetooth or from a pict-bridge enabled digital camera using a usb cable.
In February, Polaroid said that it intended to close it's factories which were dedicated to the manufactuer of it's instant film but would continue to licence the technology for the production to third parties to ensure that existing customers would still be able to purchase the film.
Buy a Polaroid PoGo - £21.19!!
Today was the day I was going to finally get my hands on a Nikon D3 – the camera I’ve been after since its launch last year. After looking at the various options I noted that Jessops were offering a year’s 0% finance deal. Normally I wouldn’t set foot inside a Jessops due to their expensive prices and poor customer service record as I’d much prefer going to an independent stockist who know what they’re talking about but the finance deal made me decide to risk it.
In some ways I wish I hadn’t and in others I’m glad that my experience confirmed to me just how poor they really are.
I started off by ringing my local branch of Jessops in Sutton, after letting the phone ring for three and a half minutes; I gave up and called the next closest branch in Colliers Wood. A salesman answered in good time and after hearing about my request for a D3 he confirmed that his branch didn’t have any in stock but the Kingston-upon-Thames branch did.
I phoned the branch in Kingston and asked about the availability of a D3 “No, we don’t stock the D3 but we can order them in” was the answer. I pressed the salesman as I’d been told that they did have one available by the Colliers Wood branch, he went off and looked and came back and apologised and told me that he did have one in stock. I asked him to put it by for me and I drove over to Kingston to pick it up.
I got into the store, asked for the camera and a member of staff who turned out to be the manager went off to find it whilst I took a look around the other Nikon bits. I noticed that in one of the glass display cases, there was a price label for a D3, but no D3. Not fancying paying £3000 for an ex display model that had been handled by all and sundry and a potentially higher actuation count higher than one of my existing cameras I asked the manager on his return whether or not the one he was selling me was indeed the one from the cabinet. He confirmed that it was.
Not overly happy with the prospect of getting a potentially ex-demo camera, I asked the manager if he would give me a discount off the camera.
"No, we sell ex display as new” was his response. I then asked whether if I bought the camera, and took it home to check the actuation count, I could return it if it was too high.
“Our returns policy is for 30 days, but the item still has to be sealed” – note this is difficult when the camera is in a box already unsealed. I pointed this out to him and asked whether or not he’d put a note on the receipt to confirm the box was already opened when I bought it.
“No, because it might not be me who takes the return back” – I didn’t understand this response and asked him to clarify it. “If you’re that concerned about it, I suggest you don’t buy the camera”.
It was at this point I walked out.
Jessops have had plenty of mentions in the press over the past few months, from financial restructures to laying off staff and closing branches you would have thought that they’d do all they could to secure the business of someone willing to buy one of the most expensive digital SLRs on the market.
I’ve now got my D3 on order from warehouse express who also offer a year’s 0% finance and I look forward to receiving it next week.