Thank You, Oh Thank You, for Taking my Loathsome and Repulsive Money

Yesterday I wrote about the difficulties I had had with my new Canon Powershot V1 camera. The camera itself is nearly perfect for what I want it to do, and no one else makes anything comparable at any price, so I plan to keep it, but editing the photos is a real challenge, and it is impossible to connect the camera’s memory to a real grown-up PC.

I found that the camera produced black (not just dark) vignetting in raw files, and it was not possible to fix this with Affinity or Photoshop Elements. Why not? Because Canon will not provide support to Adobe or Canva, the parent of Affinity.

Canon has pulled this kind of thing before. They have been very hostile to companies that make lenses for their cameras, so Canon customers have had to buy expensive Canon lenses instead of enjoying the kind of incredible, affordable array of fair-to-outstanding lenses Sony customers are used to. It’s like what Apple did in the last century when it refused to license things and handed Microsoft the bulk of the computer market.

Canon pretty much forces people to use its proprietary Digital Photo Professional software to edit raw Canon Powershot V1 files. This is stupid and unreasonable. Canon makes no money from the software; it had to pay people to develop it. It’s not like Canon loses money when you use other programs.

Photographers like programs like Lightroom and Elements, which come from Adobe, and there are other companies that make good software. I had no idea DPP existed until I had my editing problem, because no one uses it. The majority of working photographers use Adobe. Because it’s better.

Canon is currently the most popular camera company on Earth, but that is changing. People used to love digital single-lens reflex cameras, but mirrorless has taken over, and Canon has failed to prosper in that area. Sony is the world leader, and it will continue to increase its dominance as Canon focuses on outdated technology.

Seems to be Canon ought to be doing everything possible to court customers. To the contrary, it seems to be trying to become the Blackberry of cameras. Instead of making sane efforts to maintain and increase its customer base, Canon seems determined to run off everyone but the mindless zealots.

I decided to try to get help from Canon, and like many inept companies, Canon provides a forum which is supposed to be useful to customers. I had to join if I wanted help. I joined and posted questions. I didn’t get any actual help, but I did get cranky, pointless, wrong responses from customers, and then I got an amazing lecture from a Canon employee. I’m going to paste it here.

We provide tools that enable users to work with our products. If users choose to use different tools, they are responsible for verifying compatibility. We cannot (and will not) troubleshoot or otherwise support any non-Canon or third-party software or tools unless they are specifically listed on the product’s support page.

If you need help using non-Canon software, you must contact the software developer – they are the experts on the software they created, not Canon. They may need to update their software to include the latest RAW codecs; this is their responsibility, not ours. We cannot force a third party to update its software.

This is incredible. This is from a guy who, one would think, is paid to improve customer relations and keep people coming back.

I didn’t ask this character to “support” Adobe or Affinity. I thought that Canon employees and other forum users might be aware of the problem I was having, and that they could conceivably have useful input. “We are sorry you are not able to remove vignetting in Elements. We will be working with Adobe to help customers edit Powershot V1 photos with its industry-standard software. Please be patient, as your camera is a new product.” Something like that. Or maybe, as a paid expert, an employee would have some tips on using the programs I was using.

No, I got a rude lecture. After I had moved on and come up with a jerry-rig solution on my own.

This is not how you compete for market share. It’s astonishingly inept. This guy seems to think I need Canon. It’s the other way around. He doesn’t understand how capitalism works. No consumer base has ever gone bankrupt, but companies do it all the time.

I’ve had 4 Canon cameras. I bought a Canon photo printer a long time ago. I’ve had to work in an office with a Canon laser that couldn’t feed typing paper correctly and had to be replaced by a Brother which worked perfectly. That about sums up my Canon experience. I will never buy another Canon product again if I can avoid it. If a more competent company releases a pocket camera that will do what the Powershot will do, I will buy it and quit using the Powershot.

The photo printer is pretty annoying. When I bought it, of course, Canon wanted everyone to use Canon ink, because that’s where the actual profit is. They installed some kind of ink-level monitoring technology in the printer, and if it decides the ink is running out, it will prevent the printer from running. If you don’t print photos for a while, the printer will decide it’s running low when it isn’t, and then you have to buy ink you don’t need.

Like other Canon customers, I had to learn how to fool the printer so it would run.

I think there is aftermarket ink now. I hope so.

I haven’t printed a photo in maybe 15 years. I would like to use the Canon again, in order to avoid spending more money, but if it gives me trouble, I’m going to look for something else. Supposedly, Epson makes printers that are just as good and cheaper to run. I hope so, because the Epson monochrome inkjet I bought in about 1994 used 40 cents’ worth of ink to print one page of text.

I don’t want to get any deeper into Canon than I already am.

Of course, Epson could be worse.

I hope this blog post is helpful to anyone considering buying a Powershot V1 or any other Canon product. You should do your research carefully before investing. I did, but I still got bitten in the rear end.