430,000 won to get me back up and running, but I am.
BOTH my lens and 40D were blitzed, actually, since my 40D failed right after taking pictures of this woman for FeetManSeoul.
[For the full post about girly dresses, go here]
I was literally taking a picture of her with her friend to give her a thanks-for-posing souvenir, when the shutter just locked up. "Error -99." Doh!
It wasn't much of a mystery, since the camera had taken a nose-dive the night before. I guess it had just taken a few hundred shots before it locked up. Sort of like the story I heard in a class once from a visiting paramedic who talked about a guy who'd been in a serious car accident the day before, but had been, quite miraculously, completely unharmed, even though he had wrapped his front end around a tree. He declined to go to the hospital, and just went home. The next morning, when he got out of bed, he apparently had collapsed in front of his mirror in the bathroom. Autopsy later showed a hairline fracture in his back, but one that had completely severed the vertebrae. He had completely broken his back, but the bones just hadn't shifted yet -- after sleeping and waking up, the fracture completely snipped his spinal cord. Good night.
Moral of the story: always go to the hospital after a traffic accident. Metaphorical moral: don't be surprised when you recently-dropped camera bites the dust the day after.
Silver lining? Around $200 for each ain't that bad. Apparently, the repair guy decided to try and to actually fix the shutter instead of the identify-replace-the-part way of doing things through the company. Canon Korea would have just changed the entire shutter assembly and charged me like hundreds more. Korean service centers generally just try and actually FIXING the problem.
I had the same thing happened with my iBook, which technically should have been totaled a long time ago, since I had actually broken a part on the motherboard. But the tech told me the deal: you can do the official repair and essentially pay $700 for a new motherboard, which would fix the problem, but be half the cost of the computer, or he'd try something non-sanctioned, but which would probably work for less than $100. It was ridiculously obvious, and the repair actually ended up being $50 and my computer worked again, and has ever since. Yay, for fixing the problem!
We'll see if things go OK after some real time with a couple thousand shutter cycles under my belt. Hopefully, this will be the end of my camera repair saga!
