Canon Warranty Repair
The Firewire on my Canon Zr500 camcorder works great. Or did work great. Or actually works great again.
Anyway, one day while using it (without going into specifics) - the Firewire stopped working. I even tried it on anther computer and with another Firewire card on my computer, and different Firewire cords. Nothing.
I was just sick. But fortunately, unlike computers and many other electronics nowadays; Canon has a good year-long warranty on their electronics.
After a quick look through the manual for warranty info I made a quick call to Best Buy (where my wife had bought the camcorder at Xmas time) - just to see what they say about warranty repairs. No extended warranty through them; so I had to send it to Canon themselves..
I called the number listed in the manual and got the location of the nearest Canon repair center, along with a reminder to include in the box the camcorder would be in: a) insurance b) a copy of my receipt c) my name, address, and contact numbers.
I dreaded sending it back, you always hear stories about people sending someone back for warranty repair; only to have the company tell them they damaged it themselves and it would be large $$ to have it repaired. I also dreaded the amount it would be.
Not long ago I had sent a dead laptop to a friend of mine in Toronto. He needed it desperately for parts and despite me sending it with no insurance and the cheapest rate it was still over $20 and it took weeks!
But the shipping turned out to be only $4.90 and with the insurance less then $10 over all. Not bad, not bad at all.
I'm not a real big fan of the video and file sharing sites that convert your video to Flash. It's lossy, there's no way to adjust the compression factor, and even if you try to counter it by uploading higher quality (i.e. LARGE) videos it still is negligible quality.
Sure, it's okay and sometimes necessary to keep storage space down and for faster transferring.
But when I want to show someone a fairly good quality vid I'd rather host it somewhere and embed it manually in the site or blog (like below, the WMV file is stored at Box.net). Or alternately provide a direct clickable ink to my original file stored somewhere - like this.
Launch in external player
Most video sharing sites like Youtube or Google Video and file sharing sites like divshare.com convert your vid to Flash and allow you to embed it in your blog or site. Easily done, but you loose quality and have no real control over it. Good for most purposes.
