The Wacky World of a Lazy Pig (AKA Simon)

Thank you Canon S400. You have served me well.

It had been a very happy week with my birthday on Wednesday November 14th, 2007. November 17th was also Uncle Louie's birthday. For those of you who don't know, Uncle Louie is Christine's father. He had invited my family and I to have dinner with him in downtown Vancouver. What a great opportunity to take more pictures.

As usual, I put my camera in its Roots Canada bag. This bag has its good and bads. The good things were:

• It had a reliable strap that had metal clips at both ends.
• Extra large compartment for batteries and memory cards.
• One extra pocket for a small items.

But the bad thing were:

• The large compartment was a flap over the opening of the camera compartment.
  
• The bag was lopsided because the batteries were stored in the flap.
• When the camera was not in the bag, it would turn upside down, exposing the camera opening to the floor.

For many years, this bag had served me well. Never once had the camera ever slip out when the back was upside down. Even when I went on my Europtrip last year (which I never even finished writing about), my camera survived all of the punishment I dealt it. But not this time.

We were all ready to leave the house and make our way to the car. As I was putting on my shoes, I felt a small weight from my right side fall. I knew right away that it was the camera, but thought that everything was ok because it just fell onto the ground from a height of 1 foot. But after looking over to pick up the camera, I noticed that it hadn't fallen straight to the floor. It seemed as though it had bounced off a wooden door stop before making its way to its final resting position on the floor.

I quickly picked it up to examine if there were any outstanding cosmetic damages. The one thing I noticed was a light white mark close to the center of the LCD screen. Scared that the screen was cracked, I turned on the Camera to try to see crack lines and random colours. However, instead of seeing that, I just saw a black screen with nothing on it. I moved it around and pressed a few buttons to try to figure out if the display was just turned off (even though in my head I knew something was already wrong). I looked around for a few seconds then noticed that the screen was indeed not cracked, but the backlight of the screen was not turned on so the display on showed a very dark version of the picture being taken.

The Second thing that concerned me was if the lens had been knocked out of place and therefore cause pictures to look weird, fuzzy and distorted. I quickly took a few pictures but didn't seem to notice anything back from the picture on the LCD. Then again, it was hard to tell without a backlight. Well, it wasn't that scary. Thank goodness for the viewfinder, I could still take pictures the traditional way by looking through the view finder.

This incident did happen at a very funny time. Not more than 2 days ago, I had ordered a Canon SD800 IS from Amazon.com and was making its way to my friends house in Seattle. I was hoping that the S400 would be my backup in the future just in case I couldn't take more pictures with my SD800 anymore. We shall see. I will have to see how much it will cost to repair the screen. If it isn't worth it, I will look into a cheaper backup a 2 years time or so.

Canon S400. You will not be forgotten. You have helped me capture some of the greatest moments so far in my life. You will continue to be here until the day you become just too old. Ok, starting to get creepy hehe. Anyway, the S400 isn't going anywhere, it is going to stay here as a backup and memory.

posted by lazypig @ 8:01 AM