July 11th 2012 I bought a brand new Fuji camera. I only bought it because it was on special and came as a bundle. I even got 50 bucks back as part of a cashback offer, so I figured what a deal! It occasionally gave a message of please turn off camera and turn it back on again when taking photos but it didn’t bother me too much because funnily enough I hardly really used it. Then one day i went to turn it on and the lens would not pop out. I could hear the motor try and whur as it ground away at the lens casing, but no joy. So off to the shop where my partner took it in (I got to stay in the car with the kids! Great!). They grilled her on whether we had used it outside or at a beach and that it can happen if the camera is used a lot. Well, it is a camera and if I didn’t want to use it I would not have bought it. Like I said, I hardly used it. So anyway, we leave it and it goes to Fuji and comes back with a firmware update and all fixed. Cool!
Then my second child’ 5th birthday, grab the camera – please turn off the camera and turn it back in it says! At this point I realised that this was the “normal” behaviour of this camera all the time I have owned it and it is not good… not good at all. So now it sits waiting for me to pick it up a second time, but this time it has a while new lens bit. I am sure there is a more technical term like aperture, but I am really not a big camera buff.
My point to all this is this all came about 2 weeks before the warranty was up and the attitude we got from the shop we originally took it back to was that it was a cheap camera and you wouldn’t get this problem with more expensive ones. OK, so it was $349NZD with rechargeable batteries and a stand and case. I could fill my car up three times or feed the family for a week, so it is a lot of money. Have we lost the value of money and come to accept that we live in a world where things simply do not last as we expect them to? Do you accept that if something breaks it is best to replace it than repair it? This my friend is called Planned Obsolescence. They have been doing it for years, as a means to stabilise economies following the great depression. Lightbulbs to stockings were all a target. They simply did not want them to last long, otherwise people would bot buy as regularly. makes perfect sense and without it the world would probably be a different place.
Related articles
- Planned obsolescence: conspiracy or necessity? (questions1st.wordpress.com)
- Planned Obsolescence (undergrounddocumentaries.com)