Mass destruction of the Canon cameras
This pile of digital cameras, lenses and camcorders boxes is worth no less than half a million U.S. dollar:
This is Canon EOS 20D DSLR – $1200
And this one – professional EOS 1Ds Mark II. Street price around $8000
$2500 – world’s first “affordable” full-frame digital SLR camera Canon EOS 5D:
But nothing could stop those guys with the hammers:
Professional DSLRs, cheap point & shoots, amateur miniDV camcorders – everything mercilessly destroyed:
Two Canon Pro1 superzooms and one camcorder – $800 each
L-grade telephoto lens for sports photojournalists (around $6000) – smashed
All that whitey L lenses that are so good and so expensive, they are all killed
It might look like Nikon fans orgy but reality is pretty simple. All that gear were damaged during transportation or storage. Canon just can’t allow this stuff to hit the shelves no matter how expensive (or cheap) it is.
Mass destruction of the Canon cameras was posted by Vitali K. on 5th September 2007 as part of the Creativities section. Check the front page for the latest posts or use navigation links below:
eh what? O.o
i would take that for free happily no matter what kind of defect, i’m quite a hobbyist though …
:( :(
i just need the sensor part etc. of a dslr (without the viewfinder and mirror)
I think Canon will not be very happy if the damaged products will appear some way in the gray market. It will harm their reputation.
i will take em
Why did they have to destroy it? Why not sell for 1/1000 the price. Or better yet, give it for free. They could have donated it to third world countries.
well what the blog didnt say is what they do with that stuff, thats canons recycling program, they take in the damaged products, or trashed products by the consumer, u can go to their website and learn more about it, they don’t actually trash all of that, they recycle the old parts into new products, or refurbished products, (i.e, you send in your broken dslr for repairs, your replacement parts are coming from those trashed products.. so its not like they are just throwing it all away, hence them sorting thru the products, sorting lens, bodies, ext…
Canon have a reputation to protect. To allow them to market damaged goods would be unforgivable.
What is interesting is that the pix were taken with an Olympus camera.
I’d agree with the person who said these things might get back out into the grey market. I think Canon does have a responsibility to it’s customers to ensure that their products meet certain standards.
Ever seen the uproar online when someone gets a dud??????
I’m sure their repair department has a pile of unrepairable gear and perhaps this is a batch that had been accumulating over time. I would suspect that anything that was salvageable was.
.
I’m surprised they don’t just rehab them & sell them as such.
Most likely everything was insured, and the insurance company required them to make sure nothing will be sold at any price.
Caption could be “Nikon’s adopts new ploy to pull ahead in camera market”
Did someone say that Canon does this to protect the value of its products?? Hell it does!
They create new and cheaper products to compete with existing high-end products within months of release. They introduce consumer products which compete technically with their own professional products and destroy the value of investments in their pro products by you and I. They have confused the market with their current offerings. And to make matters worse, they control prices and limit availability to maintain prices when it suits them. I like the products but not the company.
This is ridiculous. one day when there are limited supplies were going to look back and ask ourselves how we can do these things
What was wrong with them??
if they are going to be used for parts, why the hammer smashing? why not simple disassembly?
p.s. – i may be a die-hard nikonian, but it still hurts to see all that equipment treated in such a way.
O god why?!!!!!
Big companies like that will throw things away before they give it out for free because having it out there free cuts the market value. If anyone can get it free, they won’t buy it.
But nothing could stop those guys with the hummers:
Gotta love those Ball-peen hummers.
The correct decision! Though it was possible to repair the goods having replaced details. It is a pity to me a labour spent on assembly of these chambers. As far as I know complex{difficult} mechanisms are going to hands of people.
That’s a heart breaking sight. But I’m surprised that they don’t have a machine to destroy the equipment more efficiently that just some hammers.
The fact they’re use hammers and not a machine maybe suggests that there’s some recycling going on but they’re hammered enough not to end up back on the market?
I just shed a tear. Or twenty.
This could be one of the reasons that Canon is so expensive. You don’t think it costs CANON anything to destroy this stuff; no, it just adds to the cost of doing business which gets passed onto the consumer when they buy the “GOOD” stuff. Maybe they need to pay a bit more on transportation and storage.
i think the reason for the hammers is that they have to be “destroyed”. a simple disassembly means that they could be reassembled.
this reminds me of a nice aritcle i read in wired magazine (wired.com) about a freighter ship carrying almost a million mazda cars which capsized. a salvage crew went in to try to salvage the ship. the end result was that mazda (and their insurance company) destroyed every vehicle that was on the ship — not just the damaged ones. there are too many variables to be sure which ones are fine, whcih ones are partially damaged, and which ones are toast.
“But nothing could stop those guys with the hummers” Hummers?!?
And W T F?!? Reputation? Bullshit. It’s wasteful & greedy to destroy it just because they can’t get the top dollar for that stuff.
…but will it blend?
They had to destroy is since some asshole in the US would get a hold of it, and say it was sold to him defective and sue them for more than the loss would be worth.
I used to work for a big-name Japanese OEM automotive parts warehouse [ not mentioning any names ] and we used to destroy parts inventory for all sorts of reasons. Some parts were damaged, but some parts were not feasible to be stored in that location anymore and it was deemed too expensive to ship them to another warehouse location. Many of these parts had been relocated so many times, it was pretty ridiculous.
The reason we destroyed them was to keep them off the market [obviously] and also because local scavengers regularly dumpster-dove, despite the security they had in place for that.
We did not have any special equipment for doing this other than basic hammers, hand saws and some power tools [ grinders ]. Once in a while we would get a forklift and drop the forks on a stack of doors or hoods to speed up the process.
This wasn’t anybody’s regular job and it wasn’t common enough to even warrant a ‘destruction area’ in the warehouse; we usually made a pile to go through in some loading area.
I thought it was weird when I was there; I only had a chance to do this a few times. It was fun at first but it turned into work quicker than you would think. These pictures are pretty close approximations to what we were doing anyway.
“almost a million mazda cars which capsized”
Uh yeah. A million. Retard.
4700 cars to be precise
- “And what you do for a living?”
- “I smash camera gear all day long. Man those expensive lenses are really tough to crack but after a while you get the hang of it. By the way have you seen my 400mm hammer laying around?”
Canon won’t sell these cheaper because (a) their reputation would be at stake for selling low-quality gear, and (b) selling a lens at a cheaper price to someone might mean that that same consumer might not buy the same thing at full price.
I’d prefer that crap get destroyed. I wouldn’t want any sub-par gear crossing my path one day.
But damn, I really could have used that Canon body cap on the 5D :-)
what a PR strategy! Nice attempt!
Apparently, a lot of people have fallen into this trap.
Why do they have to make this public?
This is completely amazing.
You’d think they were destroying priceless modern art from the way people are responding here. It’s just expensive camera shit.
I dont understand what reputation they are trying to protect?
They are already shipping total crap and buggy products to customer…
How old is this? Canon still makes 20D’s???
It doesn’t cost them anything to do this; they’ll just roll the cost of all that manufacturing and assembly work into the next model’s price.
As far as people not wanting the factory seconds, plenty of companies have come up with ways to permanently mark seconds so they can be sold as such without risk of someone returning one for warranty service or replacement. Other companies just create a new “low-end” brand and rebrand all of their substandard stuff – or create a special “WalMart only” model.
Yep, i still believed that this is a PR activities of them. They know how values they put into the products including :labor, materials,intelligence ,…so they will know how to keep & make them produce another value for them until it “disappear”. In other words, some of these parts will be on another products package and holding on ur hand. That’s it ! A way to make them “perfect” in customers’ eyes…
wat a waste man…..bloody waste…..cant believe they did that…
How can we havw some of them Guyz?
There are a whole lot of comments on what happened here that are pretty far from the truth, more than likely they were being destroyed because for Canon to re-claim what was lost in the damages the insurance company must see all inventory destroyed so they cannot sell it for profit or even give it away.
How terrible it was. I wish I had a piece of them…..
Man that hurts :(
Possibly counterfeit goods being destroyed?
Please, let me know how to contact them! I’ll buy some items, and my friends will do the same! We’re VERY interested!!! No matter what defect they have! We live in Italy! Please, let me know how to contact them!!!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO !!!
now i won´t sleep for days!!!
What Nevermore said.
Spastics.
I destroyed a stack of old audio and VHS tapes on the weekend. And niner is right, it turns into work pretty darn fast. After the first one in fact. Making VHS tapes unreadable with a hammer is harder than you think, the hammer hardly even marks a reel of tape. That stuff is hard! They probably make airplane black boxes out of it.
David you’re missing the point. What you want to do is exactly what they *don’t* want you doing.
I will buy all of them
I’m flabbergasted.
For one, imagine all this stuff going to landfill – don’t tell me they’ll recycle this stuff, it just doesn’t make sense that these guys would recycle these materials when they could have so easily disassembled everything into smaller parts that could then be used for repairs.
Second, I simply can’t believe that all this stuff was damaged in transit. Boxes are durable and are supposed to keep their goods pretty safe, except maybe from flooding and fire. I don’t see anything scorched and no boxes seem to have been soaked.
Third, it really it heartbreaking to see this stuff being destroyed. My love for technology just makes me cringe when I see this. Despite preferring Nikon for semi-pro and pro cameras it really makes me sad seeing all those high-end bodies and lenses go to waste.
i dont care if they destroy all those camera.. anyway i can still afford to buy them in the stores
where is this? id raid the damn place for parts :p
It’s a good start
Is it possible that these are the fake ones? if there are any…
It’s annoying to see what someone cherish and adore so much been given such a treatment.I believe it would have been very alright if the products are giver out to the third world countries where the professional photographers could not afford them instead of it been destroyed.Amy way,i am very available if the canon decide to give it out,because it will help at my photography school.
it’s horrible
Just a note ; Third world don`t need this kind of trash…
Segestion : why not use some parts for repositions … It`s better to use it than destroy…
I’m flabbergasted.
For one, imagine all this stuff going to landfill – don’t tell me they’ll recycle this stuff, it just doesn’t make sense that these guys would recycle these materials when they could have so easily disassembled everything into smaller parts that could then be used for repairs.
A sad moment. So many lenses, so many cameras.
oh i just need one 70-200 lens…
nooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!mad peoples!!!!don`t do it!!!!!!!!
the price one pays for preserving quality, yeah go canon!
F**K OFF FERNANDO!!!! I’m from a third world country and there are a lot of great photographers here. We too deserve to have good equipment.
Oh no…why did you do that?
baktim herkes gavurca yaziyor ben de Turkce birseyler karalayayim dedim FK dan selamlar :PPP
burada Canon a sesleniyorum:
Gelin o lensleri kirmayin bana verin, Ar-Ge calismalariniz bedavaya gelsin,
iddia ediyorum 24 e 500 bile yaparim :PPP
diyafram araliklarinin iyi bisi olacagina garanti veremiyorum ama,
galiba sanirsam soyle bi f:8 e 11 gibi birsey yaparim artikin ;)
What are you talking about, math_?
Some people Just don’t get it!
This is nothing more than a publicity stunt that is pulled by big companies every day.
They do this to attract attention to their product. They can say ” look how we only allow the best equipment on to the market” which re-inforces the quality aspect, they can say ” we recycle it” which keeps the greenies happy and the story goes all around the world giving them lots of free advertising and media attention at bargain basement cost.
Maybe some of this stuff had manufacturing defects, maybe some was perfectly good, either way, if it cost canon $100,000.00, it would be a very cheap way of getting worldwide advertising.
This sort of product destruction thing goes on every day. there are in fact companies who specialize in doing it. My uncle used to work on a council tip and was always getting people bringing perfectly good things to him to be destroyed and disposed of. Things like beds, Umbrellas. electrical equipment, Furniture, brand new industrial equipment… You name it. Nearly all the time someone would be assigned from the company to make sure it was destroyed. My uncle would direct them to unload it in a certain place and then tell them they wouldn’t be getting over to that area till late in the afternoon. Pretty soon the person would get bored hanging round
and leave. Then of course the scavenger hunt was on. He used to get so much stuff the whole extended family did well out of it a a visit to his place always included a walk through of the garage he built just to put this stuff in that was known as ” Alladins Cave”.
Recently a friend who works for a large phone network had to go to one of these destructions and witnessed a full semi trailer load of brand new, unused, superseded mobile phones get destroyed. They didn’t take any chances with them, they were fed into what she described as a giant tree shredder like used to turn tree trunks into wood chips. The boxes were loaded and out came the phones in a thousand bits.
They did do this as a publicity stunt, just as a part of their normal business. They know if they give these things away or seel them cheap it will cut into their business and hurt profits where as all the superceeded ones they destroy are rebated by the phone manufacturers.
Don’t get sucked into thing this destruction is what it seems.
It is nothing more than a cheap marketing ploy by canon.
anam yaz?kt?r günaht?r tele nin içine etti adam be
Why do I not feel sad after having had the famous Err99 on my 30D with Canon lens?
wuaaa i will cry for the lenses
To the one who said send em to the third world contries:
Why we should buy your (….)?
we spend money for that expecting that its ok..
If you badly stored em, buy em and use em!
They send this trash to the third world, indeed…
I know of a young couple of hippys that makes fantastic bracelets out of recycled lense barrels. They strip them apart and grind them down to make f-stop bracelets. They look fantastic in black, a couple of white ones would be great too..
Is there anyhow we can grab a few of those lense barrels?
Did anyone notice that only the glass was smashed. Looks like the bodies and electronics were kept. Glass can easily be melted back down and recycled. Even most of the LCD’s are still intact, I think I saw one that was smashed. Probably why there using thin hammers instead of steam rollers, ehh?
Stuff like this you cannot just sell really cheap or send off to another country. At some point someone will take a bunch of it and try to pass it off at the retail product.
Many times the reason stuff is smashed like that is it was insured and needs to be disposed of in a way that the item is totally unworkable in order for the claim to be paid out.
this make me sick. if i were there, i would have just pocketed as much as i could.
Why not donate it to the poor, they would gladly have taken it, and Canon could have been hero’s…
In a paper I am currently writing, I discuss the far-reaching impacts of destroying unsold/damaged inventory — see the webpage at http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/01/gold/larmer-text.html
Electronics consume a large portion of the gold produced in the world, and those destroying these products likely do not consider the multi-faceted aspects of their actions.
Im dead…
_/\_/\_/\__/\__/\___/\____/\_______________…
My heart stoped !
soooooooooooo
sad
Why? So many people would be so happy with just some of that stuff.
I would bloody take them no matter what,without even blaming them for faults, i think if they would give it for free to some schools or people who arent financially very well, they would do better thing without damaging the name, if you give them for free with notice it has got some faults, i dont think so anyone would blame them at all
I would be more than happy with faulty gear I’m sure we could work around the faults. Give it away to dedicated Canon users
Couldnt they have donated the gear to schools or charities. There’s a special needs group up the road from me could have used some of this stuff. In fact there’s a few places I could think of.
This is sickening. I shoot Nikon and im glad about it, I can safely say that Im NEVER gonna give any of my cash to canon after seeing this.
i urgently need them.To be specific CANON EOS 20D, CANON EOS 5D, CANON 1DS Mark 11, CANON L grade Telephoto Lence.Please send me the details.Thank U.Hope to here from you.
A real SHAME!!!
yes, thats a shame….
This is like burning money….
OH MY GOD!
this is incredible. Well i understand that they want to keep their reputation but why not to use these for repair parts. i mean come on! They can easily donate it to us :P
lol i just cant imagine what i could do with these babes :)
How can I buy these cameras or objects that are damaged? you guys sell? I am interested in purchasing. I live in Brazil
Thank you
these items cannot be sold. not even to the employees themselves can get hold of one.
give me that plz
they cant give it away or sell it it dose not work like that same in art why would you want your bad work out there
Go Canon!
I expect that Canon is taking this opportunity to understand why the damage occurred and to improve their packaging technology and shipping methods.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! :p
they do that with prototypes too – can’t take chances with faulty gear. funny stuff
Who cares…it’s just Canon stuff.
I’m a Nikon user. Hahaha.
“ll that gear were damaged during transportation or storage. Canon just can’t allow this stuff to hit the shelves no matter how expensive (or cheap) it is”
You got that wrong.
It is Chinese Customs destroying smuggled cameras, lenses…etc.
All photographers must burn with fire.
:-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-(
when it is..can you spare meh ah dslr cam or any digicam ni matter what deffect it has/have..im a photohobbyst..it really very expensive here in the philippines…………..pleaseeeeeeeeeee
WHO GIVES A F*CK !!!
I love Canon! And you guys are crazy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You should have given the cameras and lenses to me!!!!!!!!!!
i’ll fall in line if you’ve just given it for free…these could have been used for training budding photographers here and i’m one of them…
I like Nikon more than Canon, but how did those break
Who cares. The loser is the insurance company, not Canon. Really, the the real losers are the people who buy the Canon gear in the end. The insurance company pays, then increases their rates to Canon, who in turn, passes on the expense to the sap who buys their gear.
Again…. who cares. Buy a Nikon. Great company, great equipment. Canon simply never impressed me.
dibs on 200 L f2.0
porque golpeis o rompeis las cosas que jente nesesita regalarnos porfa.. lo que sea
I had a Canon and can say it lasted just 6 months and they wouldnt repair under warranty. They are crap.
fitting end for the junk that it is!
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
i’m a NIKON fan and owner, but that is so cruel no photo equipment no mather the brand should suffer like thouse did
I want them as they are, faulty, whatever. I’d take them…
Welcome to America. The most wasteful country in the world.
fuck!!!!!!!!! if i was there i’d have beaten those bastards with their hammers and take home some of those.
of course they could fix these, sell them cheaper or even test them or sell them half price but no. in this retarded system, they can not sell something under a certain price and if they can not sell a product,
they destroy it. salesmens have the orders to destroy or give the order to destroy entire stocks because what is not sold is a loss, even if it’s a $1000 unit.
i used to work on a shop where we had to throw plasmas, LCD tvs, hifi material, PC, screens and laptops with a sledgehammer and throw them on a shredder. i did not participate in this, they took retards controlled by a guy to check if everything – brand new and working – was destroyed so they can receive a new shipping. alas, no cameras allowed. NOBODY must know this.
same goes for food and clothes. food gets bleach on it to repell or poison “dumpster divers” i even seen once a guy piss on steaks before throwing them in the dumpster.
someone else explained that some productions goes straight to the trash at the output of the factory when the daily or weekly quota have been reached.
we live in a retarded world where manufactured goods have NO value, do you guys realize this? this is a good example. i think about the people who manufactured this and hoped one day someone shoot with it would see this. i want these photos and the story to be spread as much as possible.
“May 29th, 2011 23:50 Nikon User said:
who cares. Buy a Nikon. Great company, great equipment. Canon simply never impressed me.”
LOL, you poor misguided soul.