The only camera I seriously dropped was a Nikon F. Fell right
on the lens on concrete. Mashed the lens shade an also crippled
the film winding mechanism. I tried to fix it but it was beyond
me. At the time used Fs were pretty cheap so I just bought
another. I have two of them. They are a favorite. Probably Canon
lenses are better. A friend who does sports photography always
like Canon best but now uses entirely digital stuff.
On 3/4/2020 1:01 PM, Helge Nareid wrote:
On 04/03/2020 16:55, mark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Ok it was bound to have happened sooner or later, but camera and lens finally got knocked over while on a tripod. Its the first time since Ive owned the Canon 28 80 2.8L that it has had any kind of a hard impact, and owned it over 15 years. The impact wasn't that hard either, but I just cringed when I saw it in the floor.I think some testing is called for. Many moons ago I took a fall while walking across uneven ground holding my Nikon D200 and 18-70mm lens. There was no obvious damage to either camera or lens, and both appeared to work.
Question How closely are these things calibrated? No broken glass. No nicks that I can see right away. No lens cover on it when it fell, but did have a UV filter on it. Could this have knocked something out of calibration so that it needs to get checked? Mainly worried about the auto focus. Is it possible for the electronics to think its in focus at a given point, when it isn't? Never really understood how much of the auto focus system is in the body, and how much is in the lens. The body is a Canon 50D which is at the end of its life cycle or past it anyway. The lens is what I hoped would last the rest of my photographic days.
However, I found that the impact had knocked the autofocus module in the camera out of alignment. It took two visits to an authorised repair facility to get it fixed, and to be honest I never completely trusted the autofocus on that camera again.
The damage to the lens was more subtle, but after the camera had been fixed I found that lens didn't focus to infinity any more - I never worked out exactly what the damage was, but that lens is now a paperweight.
Even further back I had a Pentax 6x7 badly damaged by what seemed like a minor dent - it just turned out that a critical component was just behind the location of the dent ...
I've also had a number of occassions where kit has worked perfectly fine after a bump.
In short - impact damage can be deceptive, I would recommend that you have your kit thoroughly tested.
- Regards
Helge Nareid
