I had my D3s w/28-300 for 89 days. May 26, 2011 I had just finished taking pictures of a cropduster flying on rice seed, and backed my pickup up along the field road to a “T” where I could back in and pull forward. I placed the D3s on the seat next to me with the strap around a secure item to prevent it from falling on the floor. I had just begun driving forward and straightening onto the road (between a rice field and a drainage ditch) when my Ford F-150 (also about 90 days old, 5800 miles) suddenly “fell out from underneath me.” While I am falling, I realized my pickup was rolling onto the driver side into the ditch. I watched as my D3s fell past me, out my open drivers window and into the mud. I was thinking, “oh shit, the cab is going to crush my camera!”
I landed upside down on a mud flat about 4 feet below the road, with just the camera strap showing from beneath the cab. I pulled the camera out, and as you can see, the lens was broken, All the windows on the camera had water in them, but the camera body only had some scratches on the prism. I pulled the battery, cleaned it as best I could, packed it in a bag with silica gel, and sent it to Nikon. It was back in a week: “not repairable.”
The pickup was totaled. There had been an inch of rain the day before, and the ditchbank had sloughed off from the weight of my front left tire.
And of course, I have been unable to find a replacement D3s. Berger Bros (who I located through your website) anticipates having one for me soon.
The pictures of the pickup and my camera were taken with my backup Coolpix 5000.
Story and images provided by Mike Howard.
Another horror story from eBay about a different “damaged beyond repair” Nikon D3s and Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 lens:
I was taking low tide photos and was waiting for the sun to come out. The camera was on a tripod for 10 minutes when suddenly the sand under one leg of the tripod gave way and the tripod tipped over. The body, tripod and lens’s bayonet mount with one rear glass element went one way and the rest of the lens rolled into a shallow tide pool. The body splashed in very shallow water and I poured out 4 drops of salt water from the battery compartment. Water must have entered the body from other places besides the battery compartment. It did not appear to be damaged but Nikon repair shop said it was “Damaged Beyond Repair.” The memory cards and battery were fine.
More Nikon equipment put ot the extreme? Check this picture of a frozen Nikon camera.
See also previously published horror stories.
