What piece of equipment frustrates you the most?

Negative holder for Nikon Coolscan V ED : whatever you clean, reinitiate, reverse re-cut or manipulate film, stop, restart, eject reintroduce, undust, wipe and so on : it comes a day this scanner is only for slide.
 
@ Ronald H ---- ''The fragility of my Leica M2...''

Fragile ?
Do you play football with it, or use it as a hammer ?
If you do, stop right now and use a Nikon F instead... !
 
Anything Exakta. Lovely, classic and I want to like them. They can deliver great results but not when I use them. I do really like the 58mm f2.0 Biotar. Joe
 
DSLRs in general... I just can't get into them... I try every year and end up selling it quick. Also, lenses with focus shift on the digital M.
 
- lenscaps on my Fuji G690BL, I already got enough photo's of their backside
- accesory viewfinders because they always make me forget to focus
- build-in lightmeters never telling the truth
- my glasses always being bent out of shape when pressing my eye to the viewfinder
Got to stop, sounding like a grumpy old man.
 
Office printers are quite certainly from hell. Most camera gear is very (user) friendly and reliable in comparison.
 
Flash units.
I have I think 7 ? of these for various reasons. I have tried and tried over the decades, (all the diffusion and bounce gizmos also) but all my flash pictures look like a flash participated in the lighting. They just don't work for me.
The best of all of them was (is) the little bounce-able flash on the Leica D2. I think it works well because it is so weak !
 
Norman strobes! Had the capacitors in many power packs explode when turned on. This was a major problem since we worked around high explosives. Had a total of 33 power packs and only five worked at one time. We switched to Broncolor and never looked back.
 
Wide angle lenses. I just get along better with the range of 50-100mm on 35mm film. I'm not talking super-wides, just like 28mm. I've finally figured out how to handle a 35, but wider just tends to not work for me.
 
I hate that little light on the digicam that comes on to tell you when the camera is obsolete.
 
Any and all scanning software I've ever used. Whatever schmucks now operate all the local color labs.


+1 on the scanning software. Computers are supposed to make life easier, but doing anything seems to involve so much needless faff.

And my other frustration has to be my Sekonic L208. The first one had an intermittent fault and kept cutting out. I liked it's compact size so got it replaced with another which must have been from the same batch because it, too, developed the same fault. Traced it to weak battery contact and it now works with a piece of card wedged under the battery lid to hold the battery in place, though as the card gets compressed it needs to be periodically replaced. Sunny f16 rule, on the other hand, never causes any frustration!
 
Totally agree on the scanning software. Most of it completely sucks. Got a beautiful Coolscan 9000 (third Coolscan I've owned over the last 14 years). Scanner works fantastic. Software is horrid. Keep bouncing back and forth between VS and NS and neither will do all my scans. Some work better on VS, some on NS. And I can't update to the latest OS software because NS is no longer supported. Aaarrrggggh!!!

Best,
-Tim
 
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