![](\"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/images\/canon\/yay-for-Canon-repairs.jpg\")
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I know there’s a lot of curiosity about this topic – whether I shoot with Nikon or Canon or Sony. Or why I would have multiple systems, or shoot with a camera other than they expect. It seems that whenever I post here about which camera gear I use currently, some people are surprised that I’m not using Canon.<\/p>\n
This article was first posted in 2012, and this is the 2024 update, with some necessary changes. The theme remains though : I can honestly say that I will never use Canon cameras professionally again. At the moment (2024) I do have various Canon tilt-shift lenses, but only because Sony doesn’t make tilt-shift lenses. I also have the Canon EF 8-15mm f\/4L fisheye zoom lens<\/a>. \u00a0The reason why I use these Canon lenses is because the Nikon AF lenses don’t adapt well to Sony, or Sony don’t make equivalents to these lenses (yet).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n My initial experience with photography as a young kid was with my dad\u2019s PraktikaMat, and my first camera was a Pentax ME Super.\u00a0 This was followed by a Pentax Super-A.\u00a0 I bought my first Nikon in 1996 \u2013 a Nikon F90x – when the Pentax 70-200mm f\/2.8 would’ve been more expensive than the Nikon lens and<\/strong> a used camera body combined. \u00a0In 2002 I embraced digital photography completely. I bought two Nikon D100 cameras, and sold my film bodies immediately. (I still have a Pentax Super-A as a memento.)<\/p>\n A few years later (around 2004), Nikon’s best camera was a (noisy) 4-megapixel D2H. In comparison, Canon had 8 megapixel cameras that had relatively little noise, and a full-frame 11-megapixel camera. Though I loved my D2H bodies, it had become time to move onto a system that didn’t limit me. I bought two Canon 1D mark II bodies and a slew of lenses.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Then towards the end of 2008, a year after the Nikon D3 was released, I sold all three my Canon 1D mark III bodies, and moved over to Nikon as my primary system.<\/p>\n Here’s why: this photo explains some of the reason why I felt I had<\/strong> to go move away from Canon, back to using Nikon. The photo was taken towards the end of 2008, and shows my repair slips for the 4 years that I had been using Canon.<\/p>\n More tellingly:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So there you have it … a long list of problems with Canon gear over the period of 4 years. I had had enough after a while.<\/p>\n It cost me a truckload of money and a lot of time and effort to keep my Canon gear up to spec. It just got to the point where I couldn’t stand it any more. I had sunk a lot of money into Canon and maintaining a top-notch selection of equipment, but their erratic performance was disappointing.<\/p>\n To distill this … in my<\/strong> experience, Canon has poor reliability, which I believe is due to Canon’s poor quality control. Which in turn I truly believe is a corporate decision made by the accountants to not have more stringent quality control. This way fewer items are returned since many people won’t even realize their equipment is faulty. There’s another bit of psychology at work there as well where I think it is difficult at times for photographers to accept that the equipment they sunk a lot of money into, isn’t working properly.<\/p>\n Sure, the Nikon and Sony gear that I have, do act up on occasion. Entropy will have its way. But for professional work, I feel I generally can’t rely on Canon cameras and their lenses in a way that I can rely on the other systems.\u00a0I just know that my decision didn’t come lightly, and that after several years now, I am more confident of my current system than I had been previously.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Over the years that I have maintained the Tangents blog, I’ve tried to keep the posts fairly system-agnostic for certain reasons:<\/p>\nFirst, a bit of history about my love for cameras<\/h2>\n
I finally had had enough!<\/h2>\n
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