Canon Users

If you are thinking about buy any Canon camera equipment during the holidays or beyond, you might want to consider visiting the Canon Price Watch website.  

Canon Price Watch scours the Internet for deals on Canon cameras, lenses and accessories.  In addition to providing links to websites such as B&H, Adorama and Amazon, the have a "street price program" where authorized Canon retailers make products available for significant savings over typical retail prices.  I used the street price program, and it saved me a lot of money.

In addition to looking for current bargains, you can set up alerts to let you know when a particular camera or lens is on sale.  You can even set it up to alert you when your item falls below a certain price.  This allowed me to buy a refurbished Canon 5D III at almost 30% off the normal refurbished price and 40% below new.

One thing to pay attention to when you buy from a sale from Canon Price Watch or any other bargain.  Sometimes the items are known as gray market items.  Official Canon products sold in the USA come through Canon USA.  Sometimes vendors import Canon products from someone other than Canon USA.  These are known as "gray" items.  The product themselves are identical to "official" ones.  The only difference is the gray items may not be covered by US warranty.  Canon often does provide warranty work for these gray items, but they are not obligated to do so.  Sometimes the seller will provide their own warranty on gray items, and the quality of that warranty will vary.  Worst case you might have to ship it to Japan to get warranty work completed.

Personally, I prefer to avoid gray market items, I'd rather have the certainty of the warranty over the possible 5% or 10% savings.  Still, I love what the gray market has done.  For a long time, you really didn't see big discounts on Canon's higher end camera's and lenses.  As the dollar has gotten a lot stronger compared to the yen,  vendors could obtain the gray market gear overseas for much less than from Canon USA.  This made the gray market good much cheaper than official goods, resulting in loss of sales for official Canon retailers.  Canon USA responded by discounting a lot of its equipment, through a combinations of price cuts and/or rebates.

My Photography Gear

Here is what I'm currently using.

Camera
-Canon 40D

Lenses
-Canon EF 70-200mm L IS USM Lens
-Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 IS USM Lens
-Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM Lens
-Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM Lens

Flash
- Canon Speedlite 430EX Flash Review

Tripod and Head
- Giottos MTL 9361B
- Benro KB-0A

Memory
-ScanDisk Ultra II 8GB Compact Flash
- Kingston 8 GB Compact Flash
- Kingston 4 GB Compact Flash

And You Thought Red Light Cameras Were Bad

There are probably thousands of places to get a massage in Thailand. Some are completely on the up and up, no hanky panky goes on. Others will give you a happy ending for an extra fee, while others are nothing more than a front for prostitution. A massage parlor is a place that specializes in prostitution, usually for wealthy locals. According to my research, online not field, these places will sometimes accept foreigners for an extra fee.

If Bangkok governor candidate Leena Jungjanja gets her way, however, that smile that you leave the massage parlor with may cost you a lot more than a couple of thousand baht. Ms. Leena's pro-family platform includes installing cameras outside of massage parlors. The video would broadcast on the Internet so that wives can check up on their husbands.

Fortunately for the more philandering type, Ms. Leena will not be the governor of Bangkok. She is in single digits in the polls. Perhaps one might think that she might strike a cord with Thai women fed up with their cheating husbands. While her idea might appeal to some, it really goes against the grain of the Thai concept of saving face.

These cameras would broadcast the husbands infidelity not only to the wife, but to the rest of the world. It would be very humiliating to the woman to have it out in the open like that. I'm not saying that Thai women relish their husbands going to a massage parlor, but for many, a quiet tryst is much preferable to a public outing. I remember hearing a story about a Thai woman whose husband was having an affair. She might have suspected it for a while, and certainly didn't like it, but she accepted it. Men will be men is sometimes the philosophy. When the guy started doing it in the open and made no effort to hide it, that's when it was too much for her. He had humiliated her.

Its like that a lot here, as long as its not blatantly out in the open, people can contently ignore it. Thais are very good at blissfully ignorant.

If by some miracle Ms. Leena's idea became law, maybe Thais could borrow a page from the red light camera's book. Just send a picture of the offender entering the massage parlor along with a ticket. Its not like he is going to court to fight it and make you prove that he actually had sex there. Of course, if he's not the one who opens the mail, there could be hell to pay.