I love to take pictures, and because of that enjoyment I bought a really nice 35mm camera a few years ago. It is a grey market Canon EOS 5 slr – grey market because of the +/- f-stop dial in the viewfinder. The camera focuses where you look, by bouncing a tiny led beam off your eye and focusing where you are looking. It works better if you don’t wear glasses, but it still works pretty well for me anyway. For a long time, I just used the USM 28-105 lens that I bought with the camera body, but recently I added a USM 75-300 lens as well. On to the repair story…
I was taking pictures inside an auditorium, using ISO-800 film (not really my favorite) and the control dial stopped working. This is a known problem on this type of Canon 35mm SLRs; the control dial internals will come loose and prevent the dial from turning. Sometimes the dial turns but has no detent stops to hold it in the chosen position – this is what happened to my camera. Damn. I had read about this before, but I had apparently been lucky up to this point. The camera has never been dropped or even handled roughly – there is not a single scratch on the camera body. Despite that careful use, the camera still failed and a repair was needed.
With a lot of googling and reading forum posts from other folks unlucky enough to share my dilemma, I found a place that would make the repair. Several posters pointed to Steve at Camera Clinic. The repair price was very reasonable, he gives a guarantee with the work, and he turned the repair around in a couple of days. Very responsive via email and the telephone, I recommend that you contact him for camera repairs. It’s great to recommend someone without having to add all kinds of disclaimers and conditions, isn’t it?