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Old 03-01-16, 00:48
Adey Baker's Avatar
Adey Baker Adey Baker is offline  
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Hinckley, Leics., UK
Posts: 965
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Mercifully WPF is mainly concerned with photos rather than equipment, but I bet most of us like to have an occasional look into a well known gear-obsessed website to laugh at the 'virtual fisticuffs' that go on there between devotees of various makes of equipment (or 'fanboys' to give them their pejorative term). It's amazing, and quite disturbing in a way, to see how many list their equipment in the signature area of the comments in the forums. They obviously have advanced forms of GAS, as not only do some own more kit than is healthy for them from one maker, thay also have an almost duplicate range in another system plus all the compacts and bridge cameras as well - 'just in case,' presumably.

I've used Canon DSLRs for quite a few years and taken many thousands of shots with them, but for a number of reasons, I've 'down-sized' to an Olympus m4/3rds system. I hadn't used my 40D for a while and when I picked it up recently, not only did it feel like a brick, I also realised I'd forgotten how to use it! So the moral of this is - if you have to give in to a bit of GAS then keep it to the system you're using already or you'll never get to the stage where use your kit instinctively.

My own worst case of GAS happened back in the 1970s. I had a nice Olympus OM system but fell for the charms of a Leica! Not just any Leica, though - having been criticised for the style of their M5 rangefinder camera, they re-introduced the older, 'classic' M4 and also made a limited batch of them with '50 jahre' engraving to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first Leica in 1925. I bought one of these. Unless you've actually handled one, it's hard to describe just how silky smooth the operations like the film-wind are on Leicas (though the 35mm Summicron that I bought with it was prone to flare when shooting into the light).

Unfortunately, it had to go when I got married - otherwise it would have come in useful now for funding the purchase of the Olympus 300mm F4 (or Pana/Leica 100-400mm) which will soon be announced, and will complete my m4/3rds system - until the next version of the EM1 comes out, that is... (eek, GAS strikes again!).
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