Ebay problems

In actual fact Polonius Stu was quite upset about it all, I initially contacted him off this board to find out what lens it was and how he and his dad had inspected it.

He was quite upset because the transaction appeared to go pretty well and you appeared to be a pretty decent guy and he was not happy about having to get into an argument.

What I am assuming kicked him off was that you opened a case against him, how likely is it that a seller with 100% feedback is going to deliberately try to palm off something substandard and not treat you properly?

Why did I offer Stu help in the first place? Well I have gotten to know him here and on another board and he comes across as a pretty decent bloke too.

I offered my help because I worked as an industrial photographer for 12 years (long time back) and am currently a very active amateur photographer who happens to own and use a lot of high end Canon equipment.

According to Stu the lens is in the region of three years old, from the listing it appears it was sold with it's protective case, the likely hood of the 100-400L suffering fungal bloom in three years of use is extremely low, I did read carefully and was incredulous at the diagnosis of fungus on a three year old lens.

On the other hand the chances of a 100-400 L suffering from dust is extremely high, it's nickname is the 'Dust Pump' it's the nature of the lens, by virtue of its push pull zoom design.

I had never handled a 100-400L until last weekend when I visited a mate who happens to have one and sure enough it had a fair bit of dust, the lens is less than 6 months old, lovely lens though and my mates results with it on a 5D II were excellent.

In my opinion the onus on a buyer on ebay is to check the items they receive thoroughly before they leave feedback, I've just bought a load of items over the last week (electronics) and I have checked out the functionality of the items very carefully before leaving feedback.

Fungal bloom is pretty obvious even on a cursory inspection at home by holding the lens up to a light, in my opinion you should have seen that pretty much immediately if it were particularly bad and you should have rejected the lens then. If it's not that bad then it is the kind of thing that I would expect Canon would happily service at a fairly reasonable fee, they would even replace damaged elements as part of a service, it is a lens that tends to be used by professionals and advanced amateur photographers after all.

I've had laptops fail on me a month after I bought them on ebay, I've never complained because the seller had no reason to know that there might be an issue, ebay is not the high street even though it appears to be trying to turn itself into that.

I have never met Stu in person and probably never will, but he is here on this forum because he shares with the rest of us a family connection in the Philippines, in that sense I am his friend, when I respond on here I am taking the 'one side' of my friend, but with as balanced a view as I possibly can in light of the information I had already received on and off board. The rest of this thread is frankly Stu talking to friends, looking for advice, like he might do in the pub and the relatively gentle language used should hardly cause much offense.

Having never sold anything on ebay, I think I am unlikely to ever try in case I ever experience something like this, I presume by now that Stu has refunded your money so I fail to see what further issue you have?

Polonius

So, in your eyes, I am stupid because I use the same handle on different sites............


I take offense to that............

So you waited on purpose..............???
Aren't you a bit too spiteful ...???
Purposedly witholding the item so Stu loses the charges...???

Sorry, pal, but your street cred is gone south with me.....

I was warming up to your explanations of the facts, but this last statement of yours, makes me do a total re-think, and seriously doubt your original motives.
For all I know, fault or no fault, you could have changed your mind, because somewhere else you could have found a cheaper item, so the element of doubt remains.

I hope, Stu has refunded you by now, although I would have recommended him, to let you wait a few months, and to sign off ebay altogether as it has become a breeding ground for time wasters.

Close the door on your way out.............

Polonius you are missing a point here, nobody on here knows who you are, until yesterday you were completely anonymous and to all intents and purposes you still are.

It was clearly possible from the start that there were two sides to the story and that both might have a point and indeed Stu made this point to me in our off board email.

I do happen to know your ebay identity as I asked Stu to share the listing details and obviously could check the feedback on both sides, both of you are ebayers who have an impeccable feedback history, but no one else on here has got a clue who you are or has even looked at the listing.

I could understand your ire if you had been named personally but you weren't.

Now would I insult people I don't know?

Hell yes, I do it all the time and so do most people, I will comment on what has been said by the likes of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown or David Cameron or any other numpty that happens to express opinions that I might disagree with, in this case the word pratt (possibly should have spelled that as prat it's not a word I use often) was used in the sense of a person lacking knowledge of a subject based on the evidence I had been presented with, Stu shared a fair bit of your email to him with me.

Now yes I will happily withdraw that comment now that I am talking to a real person, I've never spoken to David Cameron but I dare say I would be more polite in a face to face conversation with him or even in a discussion on a forum, than I would be when talking to my friends.

I was using the term to describe a completely anonymous individual and using it in a way that provided a little sympathy and empathy for Stu's side of the problem as he is one of our members and he had an upsetting problem just before Christmas.

Now it is likely that neither of you really know enough to say with certainty if a lens has a fungal infestation or not, nor could I with absolute certainty, without having said lens in my own hands. I have though seen many many very old lenses that had serious fungal bloom, we had plenty in my work that dated back to the 1950's.

So I will say thanks for posting this image as it will help me give Stu some advice, Stu did not show me this photo but then again like most folk he will have been busy before Christmas so I can understand that.

My impressions?

Well to me it looks like a dust spot, possibly organic, that has been sucked in by the push pull zoom, possibly even insect remains, changes in ambient temperature will have introduced some condensation and there has been a slight chemical reaction with the spot as a result.

The spot is not on the second lens group (part YG2-0369 the stabilisation assembly) as the focal plane in your photo is clearly well in front of that internal group, therefore that leads me to conclude that the spot is probably on the back of the first lens group (part CY1-2839) as two elements of that group are fused and the air gap to the front element is small and looks sealed.

Sadly the picture is not of good enough quality to determine what the additional patterning is, on close inspection there appear to be jpeg blocky artifacts so it is hard to tell if that is just the natural reflections from the lens multi coating?

It could of course be the result of cleaning of the front element as it does appear to have a curvature to it and from the 100-400L schematic the back of lens group one is completely flat.

On it's own in my opinion a spec that size would not result in a noticeable reduction in contrast and would certainly not cause major focus issues.

Now I am not doubting that you had problems but may I ask what the majority of your subject matter was?

You mention taking shots of the moon, I hope you tested the lens on a lot of other subjects because this country is not a great place to take shots of the moon and a 400mm even on something like the 5D Mk II is not really up to the job to be honest.

For example :-

This is from an EF 70-200 f4 L
at 200mm 1/50th at f4 on a rock solid astronomical tripod



It's not sharp, there are several reasons for this, one is it's only 200mm, on a full frame camera the moon actually covers a very small number of pixels.

Stu's lens on my camera would cover 4 times the number of pixels or provide twice the resolution shown in my shot above, on an APS-C body you could push that up by another 1.6 times but even at 400mm on a rock solid tripod there is not enough reach on a 400 mm lens for really sharp shots of the moon.

Atmospheric haze, even in winter will destroy actutance, also image stabilization if accidentally left on while on a tripod will ruin any attempt to get a sharp image of the moon indeed you should never have IS switched on if you are using a tripod.

Further you should only ever use manual focus when photographing the moon autofocus will always get it wrong.

I could go on but suffice to say getting good shots of the moon even with the best equipment is not easy.

Here's another one taken a year or so before the one above.

This was taken again using a very heavy astronomical tripod but in this case I used a T-Mount and a Celestron 1.25 metre f10 Schmidt Cassegrain telescope manual focus obviously and manual exposure, camera was an APS-C Canon 20D so I had close to a two metre lens by full frame standards.



It still wasn't sharp

Just for info this is the actual scope that I used for the second moon shot above, although not the same camera and tripod setup, for that shot I used a proper equatorial mount and a heavier tripod.




As an example for comparison that first lunar shot of mine was taken on the 70-200 f4 L the second sharpest lens I have, here is another example from the same lens



and here is a direct link to let you see this shot at original size

http://farm1.staticflickr.com/205/515216650_e299580a78_o.jpg

It is razor sharp, although Flickr has degraded the jpeg over the years

My point in showing you these shots?

Well my advice to Stu was that the 100-400 L takes time to learn and many things can cause it to perform less well than might be expected, this is general advice on that class of zooms i.e. that range of focal lengths.

Low contrast can be the result of focus problems and can also be due to not using the lens hood, poor quality UV filters can also substantially reduce the contrast of a lens.

Focus problems are often a body/lens calibration issue with Canon kit, there are just so many possibilities that blaming a spec like the one in that image kind of confirms the over reaction (albeit an understandable over reaction) that I expressed to Stu.

Last point, have a look at this image

http://stan-pustylnik.smugmug.com/Other/Lens-Fungus/7172270_EDkn5#460487968_HoHwU-A-LB

this is a real fungal infection in a lens, fungus tends to form filigree patterns, though rarely as bad as that shown in that link.

I have seen and used lenses with varying degrees of fungus over the years and even if the one that Stu sold you actually has a fungal infestation, which I still doubt, it is by no means anywhere near being a heap of junk, that lens was eminently cleanable by a Canon workshop.

Just in closing the very best lunar photography I have ever seen outside professional astronomy is by a gentleman named Romy Ocon who happens to be a wonderfully talented Filipino photographer who mostly concentrates on birding and the kit he uses is way way more expensive than anything I will ever purchase, he stacks multiple TC's on an EF 500 f4 L and gets stunning results.

Follow this link for an example of his work from there you can see the rest of his site, it's worth a look.

http://www.pbase.com/liquidstone/image/131149562/original


Cheers
Jim

Oh and for reference I got the part numbers from this PDF here

http://www.f20c.com/stuff/canon/partslist/EF 100-400 4.5-5.6L IS USM.PDF

Good luck selling the lens mate. Fair comment.. Thread closed.