Neil Lathwood’s Blog

Customer service skills in this country are pretty hard to find sometimes, especially for online companies where the face of that company could be an email address!

Well, for those who go off recomendations when deciding to use a new company, here’s one to avoid - thedigitalcamerashop.co.uk. This is my story of why.

On the 25th of Feb 08, I placed an order with thedigitalcamerashop.co.uk for a Slik Pro 700 DX and a Manfrotto 676B Monopod. Total cost was £117.89. The online shop didn’t have a live stock system so I had no idea if either of the items were in stock, that wasn’t really and issue as I reaslise that small businesses can’t have the same or similar setups as some of the larger online shops + waiting for a week or two wasn’t really an issue either!

A few days later, a parcel arrived for me Prompt delivery I thought. Upon opening the package, I realised that I’d only had sent to me, the Slik tripod. So, the next day I called up to enquire about the Monopod as I hadn’t had any notice that the Monopod was out of stock - or so I thought. The person who took my call was pretty rude and after I’d quoted my reference number ‘kindly’ pointed out to me that it was printed on the bottom of the delivery note that the Manfrotto would be delievered in a few days due to a lack of stock. FIne I thought, I got the main item I was after and as mentioned before, I could wait a few days.

A few days came and passed, no Manfrotto and no contact from thedigitalcamerashop.co.uk, something I later find out not to expect from thedigitalcamerashop.co.uk, no contact that is - oh and no Manfrotto either but more the lack of contact

Weeks later and no frotto still, no contact still so I thought, hey, I’ll check on the status of the order so again I gave thedigitalcamerashop.co.uk a quick call only to find out that, surprise surprise, they didn’t have it and still didn’t know when it was going to turn up. At this point I just cancelled the remainder of the order and went into Jessops and bought one.

Some months later I was checking through my bank statements and thought I’d make sure the refund had gone through for the Manfrotto knowing what thedigitalcamerashop.co.uk was like with their lack of contact. Fail, they hadn’t refunded me! So again, I called and this time got voicemail, time, after time during that day. No phone call back and to be honest, I very much doubt I would have got one so I emailed them to ask them what was going on. At this point they were quick to respond - with a basic apology and a promise to refund me the remaining balance of the order. Great, I also asked them to refund me the delivery cost for the order due to the 5 months they’ve now had my money for the order with no contact on what was happening.

22nd July 08, They responded, yipee! They agreed to refund me the cost of the Manfrotto - how could they not but they totally ignored my request for the delivery charge to be refunded so I emailed them again, asking once more, for the delivery cost to be refunded, to this day, they’ve ignored that email as well.

So, in short, avoid buying from thedigitalcamerashop.co.uk, they DO NOT contact you when asked or to give you any updates on orders which don’t get processed immediately, they have no idea about customer service and don’t seem to care one bit.
DO NOT USE thedigitalcamerashop.co.uk!

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I blogged about the new Adobe online system that went live recently. However a lot of users have noticed a small large problem with the ToU (terms of use) that they ask you to sign up against.

8. Use of Your Content

a. Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with
respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion
on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a
worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and
fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other
remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate,
publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in
part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in
any format or medium now known or later developed.

For now, I’d recommend avoiding using the service until they resolve this which they are doing according to sources.

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Just found out about the new online version of photoshop. I’m sure it won’t have a lot of the features most photographers need but I haven’t given it a try yet and could be quite surprised

I’ll try and give it a whirl this weekend and post my thoughts.

It’s good to see software companies embracing online technology other than google, it seems to be the way a lot of things are going nowadays but how it will all work out is still anyone’s guess!

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Would I have recommended them before yesterday, maybe, their prices seem pretty decent and the website is useable.

Would I recommend them now, not in the slightest, their staff are rude and abrupt on the phone when I called up to see about what they could do for me on another - more expensive lense price wise. So onto my experience.

I’d been looking around for a new lense for my Canon 350d, originally I had decided on a EF70-300mm f4-5.6 IS USM but after reading review after review, most people seemed to be suggesting that the 70-200mm f4l would be a better buy, especially if coupled up with a teleconvertor. So I changed my focus onto one of these lenses, more expensive but obviously it’s an investment more than a cost decision.Looking around for the best price and somewhere that had it in stock led me to www.warehouseexpress.com, I had a look at their ‘bargain basement’ page and came across the lense people were recommending but with the nice addition of IS - Canon’s Image Stability system which would allow a few stops lower. They had it on the site priced at £414, bargain I’m sure those who know, would agree. I loaded up my cart over the course of a day, trying best to assure myself that this was a good choice and checking around to confirm pricing. I left things until a day later before deciding to go for it so again I loaded up the virtual shopping cart with the lense, a Slik 700DX tripod and a Manfrotto monopod and finished off the order process.

For the next hour and half, I kept checking back to my email expecting a order notification - I never did. Instead what arrived was the following

“Many thanks for your recent order with ourselves.

I regret to inform you that we are now sold out of the-Canon Ef70-200mm F4.0 L Is USM and unfortunately this item was the lastone. I’ve cancelled the order, and no payment has been taken from yourcredit card.

Please let me apologise for any problems this may cause.

For alternative items please visit our website or call our sales team on

01603 486413.”

Short sweet, doesn’t seem to really make sense in saying they’ve sold out and this one is the last one???!!! Anyway, I called them up to see if they could offer something similar to what I had ordered for a reasonable price. The lady who answered the phone was in the least bit helpful, all she could do was read a list of lenses from the website which were similar in specs to what I had asked for - I’m capable of doing that myself. I told her they weren’t really what I was after based on the price of my original order and specification so I ended the call. After looking around for other suppliers I decided that I would just plump for the non-is version as I had originally intended.

Ebay and a lot of other stores were all selling this lense for quite a lot less than could be bought from warehouseexpress.com so I thought I would give them another call to see if they could do anything on the price. I got through to a chap this time who mentioned they price matched with certain companies and asked me where I had seen the price. I also mentioned about my cancelled order and then as soon as I mentioned it was from Amazon, he said we don’t price match with them so I asked about another company to which he just point blank said ‘NO’, ok nice customer service skills here. I once again mentioned how I’d not long ago had my other order cancelled due to a fault on their part and could he look at offering me the lense at a slightly reduced cost, the answer again was quite categorically ‘NO’. At this point I’d had enough of speaking to them so ended the call and went and sourced the lense from another company - well done warehouseexpress.com, you lost out on a £500 order all because you seem to want to quote the classic Little Britain T.V show: “Computer says no”. Got the lense from another company for cheaper, also ordered the tripod and monopod from elsewhere for again, cheaper.

So folks, my advice, avoid warehouseexpress.com.

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Wow, no new blog posts this year - really need to get cracking with these this time round and actually post stuff worth reading! Anyway, picked up a new lense for the trusty ol 350d, weighs, erm, just a tad more than the 28-135mm lense I’ve got but that will be down to it being an L lense So, what did I get? A rather lovely new 70-200mm f4l USM lense along with a 1.4 x teleconvertor. Would have got a IS version for around the same price but the very kind people over at Warehouse express decided that they couldn’t wouldn’t sell it to me, see my blog post about that to come.Have to now hope that the weather brightens up a bit over this weekend so I can maybe get out and about with it and take some excellent pics - if that’s even possible for me yet! I’ll post back though if I do manage to get some good snaps so stay tuned to my dslr gallery

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Really getting into photography now, managed to pick up a Canon 430EX flashgun last week which has helped out with the macro work I’ve been trying to do. The difference this has made to the lighting when I don’t have natural daylight is excellent, shadows are less than before which can really only be bettered by having another flash unit, something like the 580EX and using the 430 as a slave.

Hoping to be able to make use of it pretty soon as I’ve got a christening to go to on in a few weeks so maybe I’ll get asked to take some photos for the occassion

Anyway, at the moment I’m just trying to read as much as I can on how to take better photos as I’ve got a long long way to go. So if anyone has any decent reading material they have found online whether it’s for digital photography or not then I’d appreciate it if you could post them here please.

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Well I picked up what I would consider a bargin from Ebay last night, got a EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM to play around with. This is going to replace my kit 18-55mm lense that I got with the camera. Gonna have a mess around with some macro work using the macro extension tube set I have so check out the dSLR gallery soon….

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http://gallery.photoland.co.uk/

Set this up to fill a requirement people might have for a free gallery to host images on. Signup is by activation of the site admin for now so if you need somewhere to manage your photo’s then give this a go.

http://gallery.photoland.co.uk/main.php

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