I seem to be one of those few, select people for whom buying things never quite goes to plan. If I buy a car, it either dies within a week or I discover it has an exploding engine. With cameras, I’ve had similarly depressing experiences – M W Classic Cameras of London ripped me and countless others off and ghosted me when I placed an order (luckily refunded by the credit card company) and when I bought my 5D Mark 1 from MPB it arrived with the focussing screen rattling around inside the mirror box.
Whenever you buy something second hand you do, of course, have to accept that you’re not buying perfection. Very few people keep things in as new condition and so it isn’t reasonable to expect items to have no signs of prior use. However, it is reasonable to expect things to work, to function as expected and at least be in a usable condition. Why do I mention this? Well, it turns out that if something does go wrong you really can find yourself repeatedly banging your head against a corporate brick wall if you’re not very, very careful.
What started as a mission to buy what I felt was the absolute pinnacle of the price to performance ratio right now, turned into, well, a mission.
In this post:
- In pursuit of perfection
- The problem
- There’s the law and then there’s terms and conditions
- Second first try
- Learning and Conclusions
In pursuit of perfection
Before my tale of woe begins, let’s rewind a little to the motivation behind buying a new camera in the first place. Right now, I genuinely believe that digital SLR market has reached almost peak value for money. Due to the relentless rise of mirrorless bodies, countless upgrades have flooded the market with second hand gold. Anyone who wants a serious professional camera for still photography is completely spoiled for choice if you are prepared to stay “last generation.”
The camera market has followed the same curve that the PC market did. For around 25 years, PC’s got better and more powerful every year, each generation offering tangible and very real increases in performance. Eventually, however, the technology got so good that we now have more computing power than we know what to do with. You can happily do most day to day tasks on a computer that’s ten years old or more. The last generation of DSLR’s are crammed with brilliant processors, amazing ISO ranges, superb auto focus and a ridiculous array of options, custom functions and so forth. These cameras easily still do the job today, there is so little reason to upgrade yet… people do, because they love the mirrorless experience or spending money for no reason.
For Canon users, as I’m sure is the case with other brands, due to the new lens mount on their mirrorless bodies, not only are SLR bodies dropping in price but lenses are too. Recently, the prices of the professional “L” series lenses has started to drop through the floor and you can buy simply incredible optics like the 24-105 F4L for £300. That’s insane value – I paid £600 around four years ago and I’m still happy with that as an investment. Ironically, one of the promised advantages of mirrorless tech was that lenses could become smaller with the new mounts yet they’re currently all huge hulks that are wider than the previous generation. Apparently, this comes down to a decision to favour sharpness across the entire frame rather than ultimate centre sharpness with some falloff at the edges.
Anyway, this surely represents something of a golden opportunity for stills photographers and those on a genuine budget, not the modern interpretation of the term which means because prices have risen we now accept that spending £1000 on a camera is deemed a “budget” purchase. I don’t know whether this is just plain insulting, madness or a sign that I’m apparently more broke than 99% of the population because I consider £1000 of anything to be one hell of an investment. Right now, you can equip yourself with an absolute full frame monster, capable of producing poster sized prints in perfect detail and also get yourself the very highest quality optics all for less than £1000 combined.
Going back to myself for a moment, the truth is I wasn’t really in the market for a new camera. I own a 5D mark 1 in excellent condition and it still works perfectly. I’ve not printed anything so large as to have a problem with the sensor resolution and I’ve never used it in anger and felt truly disappointed by its performance. The only criticism I can level at it is that the buffer is slow to flush if used in continuous shooting mode and an extra frame per second wouldn’t go amiss when shooting live music, for example. I enjoy using old cameras, getting the most out of things that still work and learning to cope with their limitations. Did I need a new camera? Absolutely not. So why did I want a new camera?
Looking at the prices of second hand bodies over the last year or so I’d noticed that there was a certain sweet spot developing in terms of price, performance and features with professional grade digital bodies. The true top, top end such as the 1DX is still out of reach to many (myself included, even if I did flex the 0% credit card to its limit) but just below that point things are far more interesting and the prices are becoming hard to ignore.
The 5D range has always been the domain of the professional, the “serious amateur” and pretty much every wedding photographer I’ve ever seen. There’s no denying that full frame is just the best user experience, especially if you’ve ever used both full frame and crop sensor cameras in the same shoot you’ll know that the viewfinder experience is like going from daylight to looking down a dark tunnel. Then there’s the less noticeable benefits like the physically larger sensor area allowing larger light receptors and therefore lower noise and so forth.
In 2025, the original 5D has finally reached bargain basement level and £150 will easily buy you a great example. It is quite possibly the budget digital SLR that dreams are made of. Some months back, Kai Wong posted a video about his thoughts on the 5D Mark II which, in his opinion, was all the digital SLR you need on a budget. I’m inclined to agree with him to a point, but those of us who grew up with these cameras know that ultimately the 5D mark II was a disappointment. Whether in an effort to not stall sales of the 1 series, or simply that Canon didn’t see the need to, it felt like the 5D Mark II was unduly crippled when it retained the old AF and didn’t really improve in terms of FPS.
Four years later Canon righted all the wrongs with the release of the Mark III. Whilst resolution didn’t exactly leap into the stratosphere (but who needs more than 22MP anyway?) everything else was subtly improved – most notably the stupendous AF was taken from the 1D and the FPS increased from 3.9 to 6. These were significant developments.
Before this, if you wanted to shoot sports or action, you picked a 1D. If you were a wedding, landscape or studio photographer, you chose the 5D. Now, with the launch of the 5D, you suddenly had a really rather compelling option. With the vastly superior AF and continuous shooting introduced on the 5D Mark III, now there was a camera that could quite feasibly do it all. This is what caught my interest. If I were to buy another DSLR, I wanted it to be the “one camera to rule them all” – a machine that could truly be used for any scenario I found myself in now or even unexpectedly in the future.
Now, you may have heard me say this before, but it is important to point out that just because a camera is “old” this does not mean that it has suddenly become useless. Image quality does not degrade over time and, unlike an old car, nor does performance. What was superb in 2012 is still superb today and the 5D Mark III is a great example of this in action. The auto focus performance, in particular, of this camera is nothing short of incredible. Couple that with an ISO range of 50 to “you can literally see in the dark” and you’ve got yourself a formidable piece of future proof kit.
If we stop and think for a moment, when are you ever going to need more than ISO 256,000, more than 6fps in 99% of situations, more than 61 AF points and larger than 22MP resolution? For nearly 100% of people who are not paid to take pictures, the answer to that question is never.
The deal was done – I could now afford to buy one digital camera to do everything I’d ever need. All I had to do was find the right one…
The problem
The biggest problem with the 5D Mark III is that it was so good that people used them. A lot. The second hand market is flooded with examples right now but the vast majority have fired off hundreds of thousands of clicks. It is testament to the design team who put this shutter assembly together, because for something that is only rated to 150,000 actuations, there are lots of examples that are for sale with 500,000 clicks and I’ve even seen more than one with over a million.
I’m sure that many of these cameras will probably carry on clicking merrily into the future but some won’t. You’re absolutely playing the lottery by buying a camera that has well exceeded its rated shutter life. Whilst the internet is full of tales of million click veterans, it’s equally full of stories of those that have died shortly after the 150,000 mark. I guess a lot comes down to how the camera was used, stored and so forth. If you spend £259 on the camera above, sure you’ll have a good time for very little cash, but you wouldn’t want to rely on it in any sort of way and a shutter replacement will set you back £400 including parts and labour. Ask me how I know…
The challenge, then, is to find one for a reasonable price which has a low shutter count and is still in cosmetically good condition. Ah, the cosmetic condition. About that. The second main issue these cameras have is paintwork. It would appear that Canon coated these cameras in disappearing paint because it is nigh on impossible to find them without the telltale rub marks from straps, bags and general use. Some are in such poor condition that they are more silver than black.
With this in mind I waited months (and I do mean months) to find the Goldilocks of 5D mark III’s and eventually in March I thought I’d found it. I ordered from MPB a camera that had a measly 44,000 shutter activations and was to all intents and purposes cosmetically perfect. It arrived without the original charger or batteries (who are these people that lose their chargers?) but initially what arrived seemed to be absolutely spot on.
I spent a while cleaning and checking it over, charged the batteries, fired a couple of test shots and seeing that everything seemed to be in order, I then fatally left it for over a week before I had a reason to use it in some kind of meaningful way.
I took the camera out to shoot cars at a local racetrack along with the EOS 33 I’d been using for another review. It performed flawlessly and I very quickly grew to love the quality of life improvements such as auto ISO and of course the incredible AF tracking performance that was right at home with fast moving cars. When I got home and downloaded the images, however, I started to notice something odd. Every single image had a tiny black circle roughly one sixth in from the right and pretty much half way down the image. I did some test shots with different lenses to eliminate that being a potential cause of the problem before realising that this black blob was indeed part of the camera.
I knew something wasn’t quite right because normally dust or other dirt shows itself up as slightly translucent circles that are annoying but easy to clone out if you don’t want to clean your sensor. The thing is, this camera has a sensor cleaning mode built in and shouldn’t really attract all that much dirt in the first place, but most worryingly this black dot was fully opaque – not your average dirt spot.
Under a magnifying glass you could see that there definitely was something on the sensor so I had a few options. First, I could try and clean it myself. This, I decided, was the least sensible option because even though it’s highly unlikely, if I somehow managed to break anything or damage the sensor further at this point I’d be left with a useless camera that was definitely my problem to sort. The second option was to send it back. This was the disappointing but probable course of action to take – but there was one small problem. I was exactly 13 days into a 14 day return window and guess what? The next few days were a Sunday followed by a Bank Holiday. So, in the end, I decided to go with option three – send it to Canon.
My logic went along the lines of rather than arguing with MPB about whether Bank Holidays count as one of your 14 days, if Canon could service it then fine, I’d take the hit and pay for it to be sorted – it was, after all, a really decent example and worth the extra £100 or so it’d cost. If they couldn’t, or discovered something else, at least then I had cast iron evidence to go back to MPB with so there could be no argument that there was an issue to sort. I boxed it up in the same packaging it had arrived in and shipped it off to Canon.
There’s the law and then there’s terms and conditions
Some weeks later, Canon called with the predictable news that despite “spending well over an hour trying to clean it” they couldn’t rid it of this stubborn black dot. Their solution was complete sensor assembly replacement at a cost of approximately £150 for the sensor and the same again to fit it. Plus VAT. Effectively, the same as the camera is worth again to rid it of the black splodge of doom. The guy on the phone was very nice but did then say the fatal words “it is an old camera though, you could just put it towards buying an R series.”
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Old? Jesus, he really didn’t realise the kind of sad old git he was talking to, did he? I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was my dream camera and I’m too broke / tight / rigidly set in my views to want to buy the latest kit. I asked him to send it back and said I’d get back in touch with MPB.
One thing I’d noticed about MPB during my months of crawling their site for the ideal camera was that there had been a noticeable and definite change in their grading of equipment. A few years back when I picked up my original 5D from them there was little argument that an “excellent” camera was indeed just that – practically new. The same was true for those graded “good.” Now, however, cameras that were quite obviously worse for the wear were being graded as good and even excellent. These cameras had significant marks to their screens, missing eye pieces, lots of paint missing and although not a cosmetic issue – extremely high shutter counts. That’s not “good” in anyones book, surely?
This is one of the reasons why I’d taken so long to select a camera to buy in the first place. What initially looked like a decent buy turned out to be not so great on closer inspection. Time and again cameras graded as good with a reasonable shutter count were in unacceptably poor or unacceptably damaged condition.
Things started out really well. I called MPB and spoke to a genuinely friendly person on the phone. She was apologetic and explained that they’d have the camera back and try to either repair or replace it like for like. That’s absolutely spot on – you can’t fault that level of service and it is exactly what should happen in this kind of circumstance.
The Consumer Rights Act of 2015 is really clear about what should happen when something goes wrong with a purchase. Within 14 days, you can return anything bought online for any reason – you don’t need anything to actually be wrong. After this, if something goes wrong within 6 months, it’s return for a replacement or a repair and after 6 months it should be the same case, but you might have to prove that the fault existed when you bought the item or that the problem you’re having has developed as a genuine fault rather than just falling apart through normal use. All of this is covered by the blanket caveat that goods sold must be fit for purpose, as described and last a reasonable length of time. The most difficult part to prove legally and most often challenged in a legal environment is the “reasonable length of time” – it can often be the decision of a judge as to what “reasonable” actually means.
So, does my camera pass this test? Of course – it is not fit for purpose as the images are marked, it is not as described because you cannot describe a camera with a black spot on each image as being in “good condition” and I was well within the 6 month window where legally I do not have to prove that the fault was there from purchase – it is assumed to be as such and besides, I had Canon to back me up in this case with their inspection and diagnosis of the problem. As clear a case as you could get, or so I thought.
Why is the law suddenly so relevant? Well, later that day I then received an email which, to paraphrase, said “awfully sorry but we don’t cover this kind of damage under our guarantee so it’s not something we’d sort out for you.”
You can picture the steam coming out of my ears, cartoon style. She went on to say that I “really should have tried to report it sooner.” Yes. We should all sit down and do the comprehensive quality control checks and tests that we foolishly expect to have been carried out for us by MPB because, I don’t know, it says they do thorough checks of equipment all over their website?
To detour into the legal world once more, guarantees and terms and conditions do not have the ability to override your statutory rights. In other words, the law is the law and regardless of what a company thinks, writes on its website or decides are its terms and conditions, they cannot deny nor ignore your standard rights as given to you in a relevant Act. As such, their guarantee is in addition to your statutory rights to refund, return or replacement and these guarantees are not subtractive, meaning they cannot take anything away from your rights. Long story short, any guarantee is a “bonus” on top of the baseline you should expect from your normal legal rights.
This is where the whole system falls down. Companies do not seem to train their staff on anything but their own terms and conditions. This is fine if those terms and conditions happen to explicitly include statutory guidance but often, and clearly this is the case for MPB, they do not or have been overlooked entirely. This was very quickly going to degenerate into a “it wasn’t there when we sent it you” argument.
The law and guarantees are loss makers and I am not the first person to experience a company trying its best to wriggle out of those responsibilities with “ah yes, but…” exceptions, clauses and excuses. Profits aside, the sad thing is that when a company refuses to acknowledge a persons statutory rights, then their reputation with at least that individual lies firmly in tatters. Word of mouth, any business will tell you, can be either the best promotion there is, or the worst indictment.
Despite asking for some sanity and pointing out that MPB really don’t have the ability to change the law, they still failed to acknowledge that it might be a good idea to repair or replace the camera. That was until I may have left a rather negative review on Trust Pilot for the world to see. Would you believe it, but within an hour, someone had emailed me and offered to take the camera back and provide a full refund. However, you’ll never guess what, this was a “gesture of good will” and still they maintained that they didn’t really have to repair or replace my camera if they didn’t want to.
This experience leaves a rather bitter taste in the mouth but is depressingly typical of many sales experiences, like buying a car for example. Dealers will bend over backwards to make the sale to you, but afterwards… you are no longer profit and therefore a hindrance. I completely understand that there are many, many dishonest people who play these systems to death, costing a fortune in unwarranted refunds and replacements. However, it should not then result in those who are entirely honest and decent having to engage in what is effectively customer service warfare in order to assert the most basic of legal rights.
MPB went on to offer me more “goodwill” gestures in the form of discount codes (but only if I should spend more than £200 with them). I politely pointed out that from a moral standpoint that doesn’t sit well and it’s unlikely I’ll ever do business with them again. Will they miss me? No, of course not, but voting with your feet (or wallet as it is) is the only option you really have in these situations.
Second first try
So, just like that I was effectively back to square one, only now I had a couple of spare batteries for a camera I no longer owned. I did contemplate just not bothering and sticking with my 5D Mark I but then I have a few jobs coming up this year where those extra features would definitely come in handy. It was then that I remembered the company that I used to buy all of my new DSLR gear from – Warehouse Express or WEX as they’re more commonly known.
The second hand experience from them is quite literally another world compared to MPB. Straight away they do two things better than MPB. The first is their grading system is incredibly detailed. Not only are there 10 different levels that can be applied to cosmetic condition, but these are often broken down into plus and minus variations as well. They are extremely specific about condition to the point where there really can be no argument about what you’re expecting and what you actually get. Second, the photos of each item are much better and you can zoom in to an absurd level of detail to check items very carefully before committing to buy them. On top of that you get a detailed description and interestingly they specify whether the sensor is clean and clear from marks or debris. That, to me, was quite important…
Within minutes I’d found a grade 8 camera which looked almost new except for a slight paint rub on the base. Better still was the fact it had all of 12,000 clicks on the shutter, the original box, charger and battery. All of this must cost a fortune, then? No, it was the exact same price as the one I’d bought from MPB. The only problem was it was in Edinburgh – I ordered it and sent it to their Birmingham store to collect which is a further advantage as you can physically check out the camera before committing to keeping it. It arrived from Scotland to Birmingham in one day.
There’s a lot to be said for physical retail outlets and the experience of collecting from them was very reassuring. They waited while I checked everything was in order, fired off a few test shots, looked over the condition. Moreover they went out of their way to point out they’d accept it back no matter what if something was wrong with it and I had more than 14 days to do so. Who knew?
After a long conversation with their staff it became obvious that they invest a lot of money in equipment and training to check the condition and function of second hand items. To cut an already too long story short, I can honestly say that whilst mistakes may happen, I think they’re far, far less likely at WEX than MPB. I’ll be going back there in future without a doubt.
Learning and Conclusions
What do we learn from this situation?
Things go wrong. This is totally normal and to be expected. Sometimes things get missed, problems occur after checking and devices just plain give up the ghost for seemingly no reason at all. Anyone reasonable must expect this and deal with it when it happens.
Does this mean that MPB are a terrible retailer and no one should ever trust them again? In all honesty – I don’t think they’re any worse than a huge majority of large retailers that you could pick from. The majority of their sales will go through without a problem and they will undoubtedly have many thousands of satisfied customers.
Will I buy from them again? No. Not unless it was an absolute throw away item like the 350D and 450D I’ve picked up in the past to review simply because they were less than £30. In that situation, really what is there to lose, but for anything of value or significance then no, I genuinely will never use them again. In the age of internet versus physical retailers, after sales service matters and I’m prepared to pay for the privilege of real people, real service and an inability to hide behind a website, email system or phone.
The staff at MPB are just like the rest of us – mostly good people just doing as they’re asked to do, trying their best so they can pay the bills. You can’t expect someone who answers the phone to suddenly turn round and start a moral crusade against the company they work for. If the management, legal team or whoever have created a policy then they’re going to read from the script and stick to the book. It’s what they’re trained to do and you can’t blame the poor sods who have to deal with the fallout from poor or questionable decisions from those higher up in the company.
The real learning here is that the true measure of a company is how they react and behave when something does go wrong and this is a real differentiating factor between businesses. It isn’t based on size either. Amazon will refund you almost no matter what and I’m fairly sure they lose millions every year by people with loose morals who take advantage of their systems. It certainly keeps customers coming back, though, although I have to admit I’ve stopped using Amazon too because the quality of items they sell has fallen through the floor. Apple used to be similar, unquestioningly replacing items when they failed until they realised this hit their profit margins and stopped bothering. It was only when the EU stamped their feet that they started to acknowledge that in the UK and EU, consumer rights exist far after their 12 month guarantee period.
Online retail is fantastic. It unleashed choice, convenience and low prices that had never been seen before and those things can only be good. High street or physical retailers suddenly had to react to price competition (which killed many businesses) and find their USP compared to these online offerings. This is where some retailers have shone and one clear example would be Richer Sounds.
This is a company that by all intents and purposes should’ve gone out of business. You can buy the same things they sell online, for the same prices and not have to worry about whether your new 80″ tv will fit in the back of the car, it’ll just turn up at your door. So why have they thrived? The answer lies in their customer service. Not only are their staff very well trained, knowledgeable and friendly which makes the buying experience smooth and hassle free, but their after sales service is second to none. They guarantee their items for six years after purchase and, here’s the real deal maker, they generally don’t try and argue their way out of anything when something does go wrong.
Service like that keeps customers, it makes you willing to pay higher prices. If you know that they’ve got your back when something goes wrong, well, I’m happy to pay you extra for that piece of mind. The older I get, the more I value not having to worry about things. I stopped servicing my own car for this very reason. I can do it, I have all the tools and knowledge, but quite frankly I don’t enjoy being underneath two tons of metal propped up on jack stands. When I worked out the difference between buying the parts myself and paying the local friendly garage to do it, the difference was roughly £50. I’m not rich, nor well off by any means, but I do think that’s excellent value for money and well worth an extra month saving up so I can live stress free and not have to fight the bin police at the tip to dispose of old oil.
And ultimately, this is where MPB lose. When you promise, as they do, a “free twelve month warranty” (literally your statutory entitlement), “hassle free 14 day returns” – again, your standard legal rights and that items are “thoroughly checked, approved” by their team then you need to live up to those promises. Once you break that trust – items have not been checked thoroughly, you refuse (at first) to honour the most straight forward of returns based on your own made up terms and conditions then… that trust is broken, you’re creating hassle that many people just don’t want or have the capacity to deal with and that, for me, is a total deal breaker.
Sadly, there are lots of people who do not know their statutory rights and will reluctantly accept being told that “this isn’t covered by our terms and conditions.” I’d be devastated if I’d just lost £400 because I believed these people and walked away with my useless camera. There are others who know their rights but are too busy/stressed/disinclined to put up the fight to have these rights acknowledged and again, would walk away empty handed. This isn’t acceptable and frankly all businesses that shirk their statutory obligations to their customers simply do not deserve your trust and certainly don’t deserve your custom.
This extended tale of misery has a happy ending. MPB honoured their promise to refund me and, thank God, didn’t argue once they had the camera back. I guarantee it will be back on sale within a week, hopefully having been repaired. I have my “one camera to rule them all” and I’m very happy with it. I also have a retailer that I’m happy to deal with and will go back to in the future. We’ve all learned something and I think the biggest lesson of all is that the internet isn’t always the most attractive outlet – convenience is great, but it isn’t always the lowest price and low prices don’t mean less hassle in the long run. We should ensure we’re giving physical retail our attention as often as possible and balance out the potentially higher prices with the extra service that you receive as a result because we will sorely miss it if it ever disappears.
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