Nikon F4 - fell on the wood floor !

M

mw_uio

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This weekend my F4 (with no lens attached) fell off my bed landed just under the shutter button, broke off the self timer light, and a crack on the side just under the shutter button. Right now the shutter button is stiff and does not fire the camera. I have a second F4 which I will use!
I could send the camera to a Nikon service center to repair it or for about the same price of a repair I could just go ahead and get one from KEH and get one with a MF-23 data back which I might consider! Yeah still like manual lenses and use the matrix metering most of the time. Oh well nothing to get excited about, my friend this weekend inserted his memory card backwards into his D700 and broke the inside of the memory card slot, and it is damaged. Would like to some day try out a Zeiss ZF 28/2.0 or the Zeiss ZF 25/2.0. Tomorrow I am going to place an order for FP4/HP5 at Freestyle, and that will make me feel better ! :D

Anyone have experience in Latin America with a Nikon Service Center?

Gracias,

MArk
UIO/593
Quito, Ecuador
 
Damn, I thought the F4 was indestructible! When I was in high school, my father bought me an F4s and a 50mm f1.4 AF-Nikkor lens. Three weeks after I got it, I dropped it on a concrete sidewalk! Scared the hell out of me! We bought this camera NEW, for $2500!!

I picked it up, and it had some scars on the outside, but everything still worked 100%.
 
F4

F4

PKR, eifadiaz, Chris,
- I am going to keep this F4 for parts and will place and order later with KEH, since I do like using the F4 as I have the waist level view finder which is fun to use, and I have only manual lenses, no need for a F5, much later an F6. For now 1 x F4s, 2 x F3hp's. Today I placed an order at Freestyle for 15/FP4, 10/HP5, and a Tiffen Yellow 12 fitlter. Stupid things happen, got to move on, need to focus on better photographs, and produce better work that I am interested in, gear are tools even though we love them!

Mark
UIO/593
Quito, Ecuador
 
seifadiaz said:
And I was about to ask how was the wood floor. :-|
Click to expand...

I was going to ask the same thing!

Back in 2003 I was at photo school for the US Navy and an instructor told us a story of how he was on a combat camera recon mission in Afghanistan not too long after September 11, 2001. Dropped by a C-130, the palette that held their gear came apart and everything fell to the desert floor at a few hundred miles per hour. Everything was damaged except a Nikon F2. The instructor then mentioned the durability of the F4 and said he had never seen anything that didn't involve immersion kill one.

Phil Forrest
 
I bought my F4 new for $2500 as well. When it needed a repair (aperture control arm) I paid for it because I knew its history. Great camera.
 
People like to regale themselves and others with how tough their cameras are. However, as this thread helps illustrate, even big, heavy "professional" cameras can be ruined by a simple drop of a couple of feet onto a somewhat hard surface. It all depends on what part of the camera absorbs the impact, with the most delicate areas possibly varying somewhat among camera models, depending on how they are internally laid out. All cameras can be readily damaged by hard physical impacts -- if you've dropped your camera and it is OK, the truth is that you were lucky, as opposed to the camera being indestructible. This is confirmed by the fact that no camera manufacturer will warranty damage caused by dropping the camera.
 
dtcls100 said:
People like to regale themselves and others with how tough their cameras are. However, as this thread helps illustrate, even big, heavy "professional" cameras can be ruined by a simple drop of a couple of feet onto a somewhat hard surface. It all depends on what part of the camera absorbs the impact, with the most delicate areas possibly varying somewhat among camera models, depending on how they are internally laid out. All cameras can be readily damaged by hard physical impacts -- if you've dropped your camera and it is OK, the truth is that you were lucky, as opposed to the camera being indestructible. This is confirmed by the fact that no camera manufacturer will warranty damage caused by dropping the camera.
Click to expand...

I don't know.......

My Lumix GF-1 hit concrete and wood floors three different times. It has a few dents and scrapes, and a small crack in the monitor, but it is working just fine. However, one of the lenses did not survive one of the falls. I have never had this happen to me before in all my years of shooting.

These accidents all happened at three differnet times on 6th Street in Austin, Texas. Each time it was late at night and I was bar hopping and shooting. Things can get a bit wild down there. I dropped the camera once and the other two times it was either knocked out of my hand or knocked off a table.

So, either I have been extremely lucky or the little Panasonic camera is tough as nails. Maybe a bit of both?
 
Dropped my Panasonic TZ3 on the asphalt two weeks after I bought it, from about 4-5 feet high. The lens stuck the first time I extended it, but after that I haven't had any trouble with it, and it's been six years. Man was I lucky. First thing I do now is put the wrist strap on.

PF
 
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