Went to turn on the IXUS 700 this evening to take a picture of Cam running around building towers in the kitchen and there was that horrible grinding noise from the plastic gears in the lens, three or four high pitched beeps and the dreaded message on the screen “E18”.
Bugger.
That’d be the error that seems to plague the IXUS cameras. The error that Canon refuses to acknowledge. The error the Australian staff “had never heard of.
It must be a day for computer upgrades to try their best to frustrate me… Ubuntu Feisty has had its try, now the new Vista laptop has a go as Jo tries to download photos from the old Canon Digital IXUS 300 — surprise, it seems that no matter what we do we simply cannot convince the laptop to read the photos from the camera. It can see the camera, but it can’t read anything off them.
So far I’ve used the following cameras (reverse chronological order):
Samsung Galaxy S10 The two year replacement stretched out to nearly three… again… but the S8 was replaced by an S10 and as usual we got the S10 just after the next model had been released and made it to all the stores. I suspect the corporate procurement uses up the old models, but at no cost to me it does just fine for what I want!
After two months and three days of being off with Canon Australia’s repair facilities I’ve finally got my faulty camera repaired and sent back — well actually I’ve got a brand new replacement one. I think another two weeks went by after the last two weeks after the two weeks previously, the parts still hadn’t turned up, Canon still hadn’t repaired it, and the embarrasment factor got so bad that they just sent me a new one!
Six weeks and counting…. The six month old camera has now been six weeks at Canon Australia with the dreaded “E18” error, an error that Canon Australia claimed they have never heard of.
Its now two weeks since the “parts should be here in two weeks” statement so I called them up again.
Quotes from today’s phone call
“No, the parts haven’t arrived yet and we have no known ETA for the parts.
Amazingly, after yesterday’s promise Canon have called me back in only a day and a half. That’s the good news…. The bad news is that they’re waiting on a part and the parts have to come from Japan. Apparently Japan is a long way away from Australia and parts from Japan travel very very slowly. They expect that the parts will be in Australia in another two to three weeks, but they will mark on the job sheet that it is urgent, so I should manage to get my camera back in around two months total!
Its been four week now, and two since my last call it must be time for another call to Canon. I’d really like to get my IXUS 700 back before I go away on holiday at the end of the month! 13 13 83, 3, 1, All our operators are busy, please stand by…” A long wait since I’ve foolishly called up at lunch time, then a friendly, helpful Canon person on the phone.
“Seven to ten days” is the quote when I drop the camera off at the Canon service centre, “you’ll hear from us by then”. Well, its two weeks now and not a word so back into voice-mail land I go. 13 13 83, 3, 1, “All our operators are busy, please stand by…”. At last a human, some questions, here’s my repair number and I’m assured that the camera has been received — on the 12th — apparently it took nine days for the camera to get from Melbourne to Sydney!
First page via Google when asking about the E18 error from my less than six month old Canon IXUS 700. Courtesy of www.ixus-world.de:
The E18 error message is the worst that can happen to an owner of the Canon IXUS. By manky mechanics the camera cannot drive their lens out any longer and displays the error “E18” in the lcd display. If the warranty of the camera has ran out it’s not worthwhile to repair it by Canon in most cases.
Aha! He says, having just read the manual and realised that although his last camera defaulted to having the power-saving turned on, the IXUS 700 seems to have been delivered helpfully configured so that if — say — you are stupid enough to leave it on in your bag after fully charging it on Thursday night, it will quite happily stay on all night and all the next day so that it has gone flat by the time you want to use it on the weekend.
“Where’s my camera? Is it repaired? How much will it cost?” I asked yesterday. Today I receive a voice mail message stating that they will endeavour to repair it next week. That is all. I call back to ask how much and get told that the help line can’t help me — the help line has to email the technical support line who might be able to help me. She did tell me that I would be quoted the price of the repair prior to the repair being performed.
Four weeks and no word from Canon. Where’s my camera? Is it repaired? How much will it cost? I rang the help line, the help line can’t help, the help line has to email the technical support who might be able to help. Sounds familiar…
I blame my uncle! Last weekend when we visited and got to see Graeme on his flying visit to Australia he had a shiny new camera. Not just any shiny new camera either — the same model IXUS 700 I’ve been debating with myself…. The last fortnight has been extra difficult too, with the old camera in for repair at Canon, and me with no camera. Prices seem to range from a RRP of $885 down to $660, with half a dozen businesses selling them for around $570 via eBay in Australia as “Pay in Australia, shipped from Hong Kong to you and identified as ‘gift’ for customs to avoid GST.
Hmm, an easy to use camera. An EASYSHARE ™ camera. A camera purchased partly on the premise that it can be plugged straight into its printer and needs no computer. The new owner opens the box, there is no manual, three CDs and a single sheet of paper fall out. The manual is on a CD in an Adobe PDF file, the sheet of paper states in big letters that he must install the software before using the camera.
<img src="/2004/09/11/t_208-0808_mvi.jpg" class=“left-floating” width=“160” height=“120” alt=”[*]"> Amazing! I’ve had my Canon IXUS 300 for nearly three years, its all but falling apart after me falling on it from a bike stack, and in all that time I’ve never tried to use the movie function! Getting all nostalgic this morning about leaving Westbank terrace, I stood in the middle of the lounge room and spun round, taking my first ever video. Soon as I get it recompressed to slightly less than 3MB for 17 seconds, then I’ll consider putting it here.
I’ve got my new toy to play with, I’m happy now. Canon Digital IXUS 300 It’s a millimetre or two thicker than the Ixus APS camera, but the same size in the other dimensions. All I’ve got to do now is learn to use it properly!
Vanity site? Technology experiment? Learning tool? Blog? Journal? Diary? Photo album? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you…
I experiment. I play. I write and I take pictures. Some of the site is organised around topics, other parts are organized by date, then there’s always the cross-references between them.
Its all been here a fairly long time. Like the papers on my desk, or the books on the bedside table, the pile just grew… and it all grew without much plan or structure. I try not to break URLs, so historical oddities abound.
Long ago it started as a learning experiment with a few static HTML pages, then I added a bit of server-side includes and some very ugly PHP. A hand-built journal/blog on top of that PHP, then a few experiments in moving to various static publishing systems. I’ve never wanted a database-based blogging engine, so over the years I’ve tried PHP, nanoblogger, emacs-muse, silkpage and docbook before settling on Emacs Org mode for writing and jekyll for publishing. But the itch remained… I never really liked jekyll and the ruby underneath always seemed so much black magic. So now the latest incarnation is Org mode and hugo.
