If it’s perfect, they stop making it

Why is it that just when you think you’ve found the perfect version of something, they stop making it?

There’s probably some long complicated mathematical formula that explains why this happens, but I’d rather hear a reasonable explanation for this inexplicable phenomena in plain English, if one exists.

I recently broke the battery door on my digital camera. It’s been cracked for a couple of months, but since the camera continued to operate perfectly in every other way, I figured I had some time before the problem became pressing.

The problem became immediately pressing at the chili fest at Pearly Baker’s Alehouse this weekend when I arrived amidst 500 avid chili fans only to discover the battery door had cracked further while in my bag and now would not stay shut, making the camera inoperational. Though I live only a few blocks away, this weekend’s frigid cold convinced me to improvise rather than run back to my apartment in search of electrical tape; the lanyard strap on the flash drive I carry served reasonably well wrapped tightly around the camera to hold the door shut, getting me through the shoot.

My complaint is not that the battery door broke. While it would have been nice if it hadn’t, my camera has been traveling with me on a daily basis for more than a year, and it takes quite a beating. This is the only thing that has begun to show any wear, other than the place where I have literally worn the silvering off the shutter button.

No, my complaint is that Konica-Minolta has ceased to make cameras!

That the company would no longer make cameras, film or digital, was announced shortly after I purchased my Dimage Z3 (one of the most awesome SLR “semi-pro” digital cameras out there, in this humble reporter’s opinion). I was pretty disappointed when I heard the news, but the company promised to support their discontinued products for the next seven years, so I figured I was still pretty safe.

So I went to their Web site this weekend, and while the camera is still supported, the customer service has been turned over to Sony. No real information on how I order a replacement battery door is on the site, so I will have to call them and figure out the logistics with, hopefully, a real live person, since I don’t want to part with my camera for a few weeks to send the camera off to one of their service centers for something I can fix myself if I only had a replacement battery door.

While I am supplied with a quality Nikon through the newspaper, it’s all of the things I tried to avoid when I chose a camera for myself, now about a year and a half ago. I consider myself to be pretty tech-savvy; but that camera and its non-features frustrate me enough to want to physically smash it instead take pictures with it.

I researched what I wanted in the way of a digital camera for a long time before I purchased my Z3, and pretty much nothing on the market has its features in a similar package with a similar quality for a similar (and exceedingly reasonable) price. The camera I have has an excellent lens with 12x optical zoom, a ridiculously fast processing unit, a good light card, operates on AA batteries and has a great variety of features that are all user-friendly. And all that fits in a reporter’s bag perfectly—it’s not as bulky or clunky as many other cameras in its class. I’ve loved it since the day it arrived.

While I’m not yet ready to part with my Z3 (in fact, I’m considering trolling the Internet for its backup twin, though last I checked, they were about $40 more than I paid for mine—imagine that, electronics that gain in value after they are discontinued! I guess other people really like that camera too.), I do realize that I probably should start looking for its successor. In the light-speed world of computers, the three years that have passed since its introduction make it ancient.

The Z5, the last in the Minolta series, is the Z3 with a little more mega pixel power, but alas, it was discontinued with the rest of the cameras, so it wouldn’t do me much good.

Which leaves me searching for to replace product that, as far as I am concerned, has already been perfected, but is no longer being manufactured by that company. Already owning the perfect camera, I haven’t looked at what’s out there recently, but I’m hoping against hope that some manufacturer has moved to fill the void left by the departure of the Dimage Z series of cameras, updated, of course, so I can have “perfection” for another couple of years before the tech world shifts the ground beneath our feet yet again.

So, if in the near future, I show up at an event you’re attending looking more than a bit annoyed and carrying a bulky Nikon whose flash insists on going off in your face even though I “told” it not to, you’ll know I’ve yet not succeeded in my quest.

(Originally published in The Easton News, February 8, 2007)