--- "Icoz, Evrim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > As a follow up to my question earlier about which > body to choose, how can I > make sure that the body I chose is not defective in > one way or the other?
Best way is to buy from reputable dealers that offer a warranty for their used gear... I find that the people who don't stand behind their used equipment in this way are MUCH more likely to burn you (I've had great luck with B&H, KEH and Cameta Camera, among others). For private party sales, you probably want to have the body checked by a competent technician before you buy. In terms of stuff you can do, if you go down the list and test all the functions that are enumerated in the instruction manual (self-timer, mirror lockup, depth of field preview, etc.) and see that they work, that's real good. The Magic Latern Guides are great in this respect... well worth the fifteen bucks or so. The biggest item of concern is the shutter... it can APPEAR to be working properly in that it opens and closes, but that will not tell you if it is accurate (staying open the proper amount of time) or "tapering" (exposing the frame unevenly, usually due to dirt or dried lubricant in the mechanism; a clean/lube/adjust will fix this most of the time... but the shutter can be worn past adjustment.) Nothing about the external appearance of a camera will tell you how many times the shutter was fired. Remember that. Doing a test with film is usually the way to tell if the shutter is good, short of going to a shop with a shutter tester. USE SLIDE FILM... print film is very tolerant of exposure errors, so everything can look fine when it isn't. YOu want to take shots in bright and dim light, focused near and far, with different lenses (be certain THOSE are good first!), with flash and without. See that they all turn out well, properly exposed and sharp corner to corner. An item of secondary concern is how parallel the lens mount is to the film plane. If it's bent sufficiently, something that's in focus on one side of the frame won't be on the other. Look for obvious signs of the camera being dropped or banged, realizing it's easy and cheap to change covers on some models. Again, a film test is the best way to tell. YOu want to take pictures at a wide aperture of something fairly flat, focused close for that narrow depth-of-field. Newspapers are great test targets for this. I find that on these modern electronic wonders, meters and autofocus either work or they don't. If they do, they almost always stay that way. If there are LCD displays on the camera (and there are on all EOS) be sure those aren't faded or bleeding. Do all the displays work in the finder? Does switching the metering modes work? Do all of the focus modes work properly? On rare occasions, a camera might drain batteries due to an internal short. This can be hard to find until you've had the camera a while (a good tech can find it by checking the current drain with an ammeter)... again, a good warranty is your best recourse. The great bugaboo with EOS is that not all third-party lenses work with all bodies... they newer bodies being the biggest problem with the older lenses. If you have and use third party lenses and plan on using them with the body your're buying, make sure they work with it! Check AF, and that the aperture stops down (put the camera is manual mode with a long shutter speed and a small aperture, and see that the diaphragm closes down when you fire the shutter, and opens back up when the shutter closes.) Visible dirt, inside or out, is usually a bad sign, though a few specks of dust on the mirror or screen are unavoidable and don't affect pictures. The inside, from the front with the lens off, and with the back open, should be pretty clean. I usually don't think very much of scrapes or scratches unless they are on optical bits like the finder, screen or mirror. Cosmetics are what you can live with, realizing that you can save some money on stuff that doesn't look pristine. >I > live in Portland, OR, and am curious if I should > take it to a shop to get it > checked. How much would it cost? Most shops have a guy who will "look" at a camera for nothing, and then you get what you pay for! In my experience, a good shop will charge $25-50 for an end-to-end test and inspection of a used camera that includes a shutter timing test. If you're going to plunk down several hundred dollars for a camera you plan on using for a while, it's well worth the money. Good luck... you can save a lot of money on used gear if you buy carefully. MadMat __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Find a job, post your resume. http://careers.yahoo.com * **** ******* *********************************************************** * For list instructions, including unsubscribe, see: * http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/eos_list.htm ***********************************************************
