Risking to make a big fool of myself I’m sharing this story as a warning for others. The other day I bought myself a new camera. A Canon SLR, the 500D body, with an 18-200 mm tele lens. Unfortunately I was properly taken in during the process.
I told the vendor that I wanted the Canon EF-S IS lens, but she said she had a good price on the corresponding Sigma lens. The price was good and I bought the system. When I got home and unpacked the purchase I discovered that they had packed me the Sima DC lens, without optical stabilization (a feature present on all modern tele lenses).
The vendor refused to cancel the whole deal and wanted a lot of money to change the lens. I therefore decided to take her offer to buy back the lens, just to get the mess over with. Unfortunately we had never discussed the prices for the body and the lens separately, so I probably ended up paying too much for the body this way. At his stage I now possessed a camera body, but no lens.
A forced smile?
I went to an other shop and bought just the lens (the right one with Optical Stabilization), and at the end of the day I had paid 100 euros more for the total system than if I would have bought both the body and the (Canon) lens from the second vendor! The bundled price is much cheaper than buying separate.
If you are in Langkawi and want a camera, don’t buy from the Chinese lady downtown! I later found out that she gets a lot of complaints, so I am not the only fool around.
