jason thurber's blog

The following is a paraphrased, but accurate, account of a conversation I had earlier in the week.

Me (talking to KEH.com a new/used online photo supply store): I bought a used lens earlier this week and they’re a few things wrong with it. I’d like to return it…
KEH Rep: [Looks up my account.] What’s wrong with it?
Me: Well, the mount is pretty worn, so I can get my camera to error by twisting or putting load on the lens. It works ok, unless you twist the lens.
KEH Rep: Well, there are a couple of things that can cause that… [asks some questions about my camera, etc]… what else is wrong with it?
Me: Well, there’s a bug in the lens.
KEH Rep: A bug? What sort of bug?
Me: Well, like a big gnat stuck to one of the inner elements. It wasn’t there when the lens arrived, but it showed up after I drove home, I think it shook lose from the inside while I was driving, but now it’s stuck on one of the inner elements…
KEH Rep: You can tell it’s a bug?
Me: Yeah, it’s pretty big, and it’s stuck right in the middle of the glass.
KEH Rep: And it’s inside the glass?
Me: Yeah. And the third thing is that the lens just doesn’t seem to take very sharp pictures. I think it’s mostly front-focusing, but they’re just generally soft as well.
KEH Rep: Wow, I’ve never heard of a bug before, that’s a new one for me.
Me: Yeah, me too.
KEH Rep: Go ahead and send it back, I’ve put these notes in your file. Sorry about that.

What have I learned? KEH is a good place, with nice folks on the phone (this is my second, totally painless, return to them). And always shake any used gear around a bit to see if anything falls out… or, sometimes more importantly, doesn’t fall out! Oh yeah, and I should have taken a picture of the bug 🙂

If you haven’t been following the saga of the Delkin Cardbus32 and Delkin’s support (or lack thereof) for OSX here’s a short (self-centered) history:
– I posted this summary of my problems.
– Delkin issued an apology for taking so long with the drivers. Here’s the letter on Rob Galbraith’s site.
– Delkin recently released new driver’s for OSX (available here) that don’t require restarting your laptop every time you want to download a CF card.

I tested it yesterday on my newly-rebuilt fresh-from-Apple laptop (that’s a whole other story) and it seems to work fine. It’s FAST, and was worth the wait. If you download images in the field to a Mac laptop, this is the way to go!

Damn comment spammers! Oh well, they were easily cleaned up with a little “comment_author not in” SQL (my highly non-automated version of a comment white-list).