On our recent trip to Botswana one of the Canon 1Ds Mark II started behaving oddly. When trying to take a sequence of shots the camera would freeze and up would come the message "error 99". This was rather tedious when shooting pictures of Lions cubs playing in front of us! At one stage we thought it may be the heat, but were not sure.
On our return to London we took the camera down to those nice people at Fixation. Back came the answer; shutter needs replacing. All shutters have a limit on how many shots you can take. In the case of these cameras it is 150,000 shots. We have had these cameras about 4 years and we now think that is how many shots we have taken. So earlier this week after being relieved of £600 for the two repairs, we have these bodies which should last another 4 years ... perhaps!
In the interests of ensuring our clients have the chance to try our the best equipment, we have managed to buy two Canon 5D Mark IIs. When Adam rang up Warehouse Express he was told they had backorders of 250 bodies and only 200 were being delivered before 31 December. Luckly one of our good contacts in Japan, Toshi, went out hunting and found two bodies and two spare batteries. These arrived two days ago, just in time to take to Antarctica! We will give a full report on our return. We are very excited thinking about taking videos of Penguins diving into the sea and so forth.
Julie and Adam
