Lone protester takes on the camera companies at CES

 

 

We must've missed this during the hubbub of CES but camera repairman Kelly Chong was out pounding the pavement in front of the Las Vegas Convention Center during the show last month to protest what he says is unfair treatment by imaging manufacturers against small camera shops.

Chong claims manufacturers, including Nikon, Canon, and Sony, are not providing local camera shops with the necessary repair parts to fix customers' cameras. Instead, customers are forced to send their cameras directly to manufacturers, which is time-consuming, potentially expensive, and takes work away from local shops.

According to this video from Slashdot, Chong says he had been an exhibitor at CES/PMA since 1985 but no longer participates. The store he's affiliated with is Pro Camera Repair, Inc., in San Diego, California.

We've heard Chong's complaint before from other camera repair shops and, in fact, it was the subject of an article about a year ago on ifixit.org entitled "How Nikon is Killing Camera Repair." (Per Kelly's beef, it's not just Nikon by any means; there's been a general move in recent years to pull back support from independent shops.)

While we strongly encourage camera manufacturers to make repair parts available to independent repair organizations, we do think Kelly's "economic terrorists" epithet is waaay over the top.

(Via Slashdot and Forbes)