Auteur: Thierry Rebours
Date: 01-04-2004 16:49
pour rebondir sur la discussion sur le Littman et sur celle sur l'achat e-bay usa parue il y a qques jours :
http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=007Rx7
c'est comme partout, il n'y a pas que des gens honnêtes, mais en plus c'est loin !
Dear William –
I bought the camera from this vendor in an Ebay auction, after considering buying a Littman 45S.
In that auction he mentioned that it was not a Littman and had no parallax correction (which I could live with) but pointed to the Littman website as reference, which obviously shows similar models and sings their praises.
his description said that the back “is a top quality horseman back fits the camera perfectly in proportion” and that “the camera has been used for years…. the construction is solid and has worked very well as a portable hand holdable large format camera that can be focused via rangefinder or ground glass”
at first glance I was happy with it – the body and lens was clean and quite useable, and I posted favorable initial feedback.
but once I started taking pictures I kept getting misaligned shots, and out of focus areas with soft corners.
I quickly told him I was unhappy and thought that the rangefinder was out and/or incorrectly set, which he said was unlikely.
after taking some more pictures I realized what it was: that the back was quite off centre – he had not mounted the back on the centre of the lens’s optical plane, but done the easier and lazier thing of just placing it in the most convenient place on the original Polaroid back. I said this was unacceptable in a working camera and asked him to “do the decent thing, stand by the quality of his workmanship and refund me the money (less postage costs)”
he refused, and tried to imply it was a rangefinder parallax correction issue, or that it was simply like having a rear shift movement which professional photographers know and use…
I pointed out this was not so, and asked him once more for a refund, which he refused point blank.
He states out that I have also bought other Polaroid items (cameras, backs, etc. on Ebay, which indeed I have, but so what? I own 3 x Mamiya 7’s but if I bought a faulty one then I would send it back) as if that somehow makes his badly converted camera ok.
I left follow up Ebay feedback warning future purchasers of his poor conversion, and he followed that up by saying that I simply had “buyers remorse”
which indeed I have now, but simply because I got ripped by his poor workmanship, and sold a faulty misaligned camera.
a bad experience all round. and one I’d like to save by getting some of my money back
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