Time Immortal

…with the EOS 5D Mark II.

…Canon has finally unveiled the successor to the venerable EOS 5D, the world’s first ‘compact’ full frame digital SLR. The EOS 5D Mark II boasts a new 21MP CMOS sensor, an expanded ISO range of 50-25,600 and a wealth of improvements and new features including full 1080p HD movie recording, live view, 3.0″ 920k dot LCD, DIGIC IV processor, increased battery capacity and sensor dust reduction.

HD movie recording? On an SLR?

Well, people have been asking for it. Oh, who am I kidding: people ask me if my puny (but still pretty cool) EOS 350D can “do movies,” which it can’t. “Movie mode” is what consumers are looking for, even if it makes no sense to put it in a semi-pro camera body.

Oh yeah, the downside of all this awesome:

US: $ 2,699, EU: € 2,499, UK: £ 2,299.

*sigh*

But hey…I can dream, right?

No, really — only about 5% of returned products are actually broken.

Blame it on poor usability or just not reading the frickin’ manual, but it turns out that 95 percent of all returned gadgets actually work despite what customers may say or think. That’s right — of the $13.8 billion worth of returned products in 2007, only 5 percent were because gadgets were truly broken. According to Accenture, 68 percent of all returns work but aren’t meeting customer expectations — or they are simply too confusing to use. The other 26 percent are returned due to straight-up buyer’s remorse (AKA significant other budgetary freak-outs). Accenture executive Terry Steger believes that the complexity of gadgets is to blame here, and not the fickle nature of American consumers who tend to give up on product setup within a few minutes. We believe this ia all actually due to the implicit nature of — ooh, look at that shiny thing over there!

We have become such an ignorant and impatient people. Working in camera retail was sometimes difficult, because too often one would see people coming into the store with more money than brains — they’d load up with a massive, expensive, full-featured camera and a few high-quality lenses…and then use the thing for birthday snapshots, never moving their powerful SLR camera off of its default, JPEG-only “Auto” setting.

More than a few times, I told a customer flat-out that I wouldn’t sell him the product being requested, since it would both be a waste of his money and my time. Funnily, when the customer in question finally did settle on a camera to his liking, he usually kept it, rather than returning it a week later.

And just because I like jumping around in time, at least as far as photos are concerned (although one has to admit that the real-life version of doing same might be amusing as well!), here’s another picture from the nursing Christmas party that I took.

As should be obvious, this is another Lensbaby picture, which I took to demonstrate the effect of the Lensbaby to one of Grace’s friends (another Canon SLR shooter, incidentally). And really, I think it shows off exactly what a Lensbaby does very well — Grace is in focus and the clear (and beautiful) subject of the shot, and the background is just plain cool. Definitely an eye-catching portrait, by all accounts.

Of course, it was shot at high ISO, but the Lensbaby blurring keeps most of the noise in the image to a manageable level.

Ah, my beautiful wife — she looks so great in this shot. I normally despise posed shots, but this one really worked out, and has become one of my favourites, both as a picture in general and as a picture of Grace specifically.