A horror story to ponder..

Tabascokid

Tabascokid

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Leon
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Hey all,

Just as a quick story to make you all sob, weep and generally drop your jaws, when AFP moved over the Nikon after being with Canon for many years, part of the deal was that we had to send all of our Canon gear to Nikon. It was my job to pack up all of the UK stock including six 400mm f2.8, four 300mm f2.8, five 70-200mm f2.8, a pile of bodies ranging from 1d mk1 and 5dmk1 through to 1d mk2N and a whole stack of other lenses including 135mm f2 and 24mm f1.4. After carefully wrapping it all in bubble-wrap, the gear was collected and shipped to Nikon in Amsterdam...







..where it was all crushed. :shake:

I spoke to guys from both Nikon and Canon and they've independently confirmed this. The reason being that Nikon wanted to take advantage of the lead they had with the D3 and didn't want the secondhand market flooded with Canon gear, thereby giving people a reason to stay with the grey, as it were. Ouch. :'(
 
Leon, you're a horrible evil person.

I'd have taken a 70-200 or a 135 off them for decent cash....alas it was not meant to be and I'm resorting to shooting anything that moves to buy one!

I'd heard this a while back that it was happening. Tragic waste really...
 
I actually want to cry...

I can understand they dont want the gear in the 2nd hand market, but they could have donated it so some colleges or charities or something, who otherwise wouldnt be able to obtain such equipment.
 
Could have used them as vases and mugs apparently:)
 
thats pretty disgusting really, not only could needy places like schools/colleges/unis have done with that, its a huge amount to just throw away, i know we live in a throw-away scociaty but that takes the biscuit! (also i would have had a 70-200 2.8 :()
 
This is a sad story and I can see why they do it, but I can see why they do it aswell as not giving them to schools, why should Nikon GIVE schools CANON gear???

This happens too many times in so many walks of life, and it is disgusting.

Spike
 
This sounds like the scrappage deal for cars only with camera kit.
What a wasteful society we live in.:shrug:
 
blakester said:
This sounds like the scrappage deal for cars only with camera kit.
What a wasteful society we live in.:shrug:
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Yep, that's made me lose respect for Nikon as well. Makes me wonder if Canon would do the same thing.
 
Makes sense, next time you could send it to me and I will crush it.... :thumbs:

Good to see you posting here, big fan of your blog latest post is brilliant! :D
 
They could have just painted them black.
 
a long time ago i used to work for Lotus when they were developing the Corvette ZR1 (in conjunction with Mercury Marine).
We had about 10 Corvettes to play with, and all had to be crushed at the end of the project to save shipping them back or paying import tax on them... I never did understand the rule, because plenty of us said we would buy them for the cost of the import duty but we werent allowed.
 
To be fair, we absolutely hammer our gear so I don't think any of you would have wanted the old 70-200mms! That is unless you wanted to get a soft-focus shot around a corner.. As I said above, I guess after years in the wilderness with tripe like the D2H, once Nikon got a steady footing over Canon for once, they wanted to make sure their footing was VERY solid. As for environmental, I have no idea although it wouldn't have hurt for them just to strip and recycle. Having a girlfriend that still shoots on Canon, waving the 135mm and the 24mm goodbye was hardest.. *sob*

@Liam Cheers! Glad it's worth the effort! :)
 
Sure I saw a pic of the remnants of this... or was it some warranty glass that'd been scrapped :shrug:

Gary said:
a long time ago i used to work for Lotus when they were developing the Corvette ZR1 (in conjunction with Mercury Marine).
We had about 10 Corvettes to play with, and all had to be crushed at the end of the project to save shipping them back or paying import tax on them... I never did understand the rule, because plenty of us said we would buy them for the cost of the import duty but we werent allowed.
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O/T I know that car companies generally have to crush development models because they're on the corporate books at incredibly high values as the tangible evidence of thousands of man hours development work. By crushing them and providing proof of destruction they get to write off the value of the development. Or something.
 
Laudrup said:
It's only glass and plastic, they weren't crushing babies :D
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But... But.... They were potential lens babies for the loving doting owners out there! I would have nurtured and cared for a 70-200 F2.8 and loved it as if it was my child! ;)
 
A waste of materials and camera that could have been used for much longer.

And @User Name

That's where our returns go :o
 
Why wouldn't they?
Sorry but that's just good business...
 
Looking on the bright side, when I first moved to digital (from Nikon film cameras) it was a no brainer, Canon was the choice of equipment, Nikon were so far behind, over the last few years, they have clawed their way back into the game, alongside this Canon got complacent, made a number of cock-ups (look at the number of re-calls), and now Nikon are trumping Canon in a lot of areas.

What we have now is two heavyweights slogging it out, forcing Canon to get their act together (hopefully), which can only be good for us togs.
 
:cuckoo: That's really bonkers.

Les McLean said:
Looking on the bright side, when I first moved to digital (from Nikon film cameras) it was a no brainer, Canon was the choice of equipment, Nikon were so far behind, over the last few years, they have clawed their way back into the game, alongside this Canon got complacent, made a number of cock-ups (look at the number of re-calls), and now Nikon are trumping Canon in a lot of areas.

What we have now is two heavyweights slogging it out, forcing Canon to get their act together (hopefully), which can only be good for us togs.
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I think thats true. Canon spent to long just adding more pixels and bigger screens wheras Nikon have spent a little more time on the high ISO.

As far as I see it we have seen canon lead with the MKII, then Nikon pull it back as canon's mkIII fails, Nikon come out ontop with the D3s. So my guess would be D4 has advantage. 1d MK VI will pull it back. Then canon win again with 1d mkVII which will be a 102 megapixel, 16 fps, 512 AF point beast with clean 102,000 ISO and so on...

Maybe :p
 
grum said:
Good business = being horrendously wasteful. :thumbsdown:

I have it on good authority that HMV regularly crush thousands and thousands of CDs etc
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They may well as 'thousands and thousands' of CDs appearing on eBay and the like would depress the value of the ones they do have to sell. Same as Nikon crushing p/x kit - if it were sold on the open market there would be thousands of less consumers for new cameras - which is all they want to sell.

Also I suspect that given modern EU regulations the 'crushing' probably includes pretty serious material recycling.
 
I'll take this with a pinch of salt but if it's true it would be enough for me to reconsider buying Nikon kit in the future. A bit dramatic I'm sure, and I understand the business argument but it's a pretty wasteful to treat kit like that.
 
There is no reason they couldn't have been sold back on to Canon for spares or stripping down.

It may only 'be business' but in this world, high value items should always be recycled - the amount of energy used in creating each item is very high (from initial concept through to mass production).

Only when the items become unusable or unsustainable should they be decommissioned.
 
Yep, my thoughts exactly. Pretty despicable if it's true!
 
I've felt sadness having to sell lenses in the past but to ship them off to be destroyed is something else!! Not something Nikon will be putting in thei magazines I bet. Would have made some pr if they had donated all that lot to somewhere that really needed it though.
 
Jayst84 said:
Crushing would be the first step of a recycling process wouldn't it?
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I'd have thought actually re-using the item as it is, would be the first step. Followed by stripping for spares.. then lastly crushing to extract as much mineral as possible...
 
PsiFox said:
Could have used them as vases and mugs apparently:)
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You mean like....

canonlensmug.jpg





Gary said:
a long time ago i used to work for Lotus when they were developing the Corvette ZR1 (in conjunction with Mercury Marine).
We had about 10 Corvettes to play with, and all had to be crushed at the end of the project to save shipping them back or paying import tax on them... I never did understand the rule, because plenty of us said we would buy them for the cost of the import duty but we werent allowed.
Click to expand...

I remember reading an article in Autocar about some place that was charged with destroying all the Jaguar prototypes, each one having cost in excess of £1million to build, but if they weren't crushed then there was VAT due on them, so.......
 
This has been going on for ages - I honestly don't know why you lot are so upset. This was used (some of it very well-used, BTW) Canon kit that was exchanged under the deal Nikon has with pro-photographers.

Of course they're going to trash the opposition's kit. What sense would it make passing it on?
Also, if they let it onto the second-hand market, who would be responsible for ensuring it was all servicable? Someone would have to sift through all that kit cataloguing it.
Nikon? Canon? The third-party that agreed to auction it?
Far cheaper to smash it all up and recycle the raw materials.

When the Army went fully over to digital back in 2002, I had to destroy over 500 Nikon FM2n bodies and all the associated ancillaries. Some of them were brand-new and still boxed. Also going 'under the hammer' - literally - were all the M/F and A/F lenses that came with them: complete lens kits ranging from 24mm right up to some AF 600mm f/4 IFED lenses, worth (then) about £3k on the second-hand market.

Also in the skip went all the wet-film processing kit: DeVere 504 enlargers, Jobo processors, even a Fuji Frontier...

It happens more often than you might think.
 
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