I almost made a (potentially) very expensive mistake today. I have been hoping to buy a digital SLR for a while now and in the past few weeks that seems to be the only thing that on my mind. Most people around me are a little wary getting into a conversation with me these days because the only thing I could talk about was the camera I was hoping to buy.

After a lot of ruminations between going Canon or Nikon I finally decided to go with the Canon EOS 350d a.k.a. the Canon Digital Rebel XT. Now I cant really afford this stuff, and it a rather tight stretch to get myself one of these considering my present status of un-rich grad student.

I am also no novice to using the web and to using computers, so I was so stumped by how I forgot the cardinal rule of doing anything on the web – never believe a webpage. Unless you know the entities behind the webpage and you trust their reputation to serve your purpose – never ever ever trust a webpage.

Case in point, this is what you see when you Google for the Digital Rebel XT:

I took a walk down to the nearest camera shop and I mentioned to the friendly gentleman there about how the website prices are about 450$ when he is charging me about 800$. Here came the first piece of news – he says that if you have a Canon USA warranty, in other words if something happens and you want Canon to fix it for you, then there is no way that the camera can cost so less. It must be some international warranty which you may have to ship back to the country of origin.

So I take a look at the website again and the website says that it has a USA warranty – very explicitly. So I feel considerably relieved. I however wanted to check out one or two of the lenses I was interested in getting and so I visited the shop again and I mentioned this fact to the person there. He stuck by what he said – he said that yes they might offer a warranty to you in the US, but it will not be Canon’s warranty. It will be someone else’s.

What? Now I was going to spend what is presently a non trivial amount of money for me so I put things together and I decided to call the online store I was planning to buy from.

I was feeling a little pressurized into getting this purchase done because Canon is offering some interesting mail in rebates which multiply when you get multiple items in combination and so I was planning to through in a decent lens with image stabilization and such.

So I call the store and I had to hold onto the line for a whole 20+ mins. Hmm hmm… what are these guys an airline booking service? And finally I get a most disinterested sounding guy. I ask about the warranty and yes, the shopkeeper I had been talking to was right. This was not a Canon warranty. ‘If something happens, who will be fixing the camera?’ ‘My technicians will work on it’ and that gets me thinking – gee, if I have to hold so long to just speak to one of them how hard will it be for me to get them to fix something for free? And then he says it – ‘my technicians have been fixing these for the last 50 years’. What??? And then a sentence or two later he hangs up while I was in mid sentence. Nice.

So the whole conversation was a little like being hit buy a snowball when you are busy picking your nose. I kind of snapped out of my self hypnotized state of mind and I did what I should have done first – search for reviews on the seller.

Every website I could find had people expressing very strong negative opinions about these guys. I search for some of the other sellers offering similar prices – they all had similar comments. What???

I remember the shopkeeper I was talking to mention that they cant be authorized Canon dealers because there is no way that they could get the cameras so much cheaper from Canon.

So finally, let me point some fingers –

This is the seller I was looking at and the one that I called up –

http://www.infinitiphoto.com/

(Yes they have a reasonably nice looking webpage).

Here are some others -

http://www.bestpricecameras.com

http://www.geniuscameras.com

http://www.usaphotonation.com/

Here are some seller review pages –

http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews87615.html

http://forums.photographyreview.com/showthread.php?t=10678

http://www.dcresource.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-7031.html

http://www.dcresource.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-72.html

http://www.price.com/vendor_review_display.html?vid=-2147483120

http://forums.photographyreview.com/showthread.php?t=10918

and so on, there are many pages out there that tell similar stories.

Well this was a clincher –

http://www.resellerratings.com/seller9662.html

Moral of the story – make sure that you search for the seller when buying online always. If in doubt call them up, maybe even multiple times. This is a handy website that gives you seller information –

http://www.resellerratings.com/

More practically, simply search the web for “review <seller name>”.

Ensure that you are not going for opinion bases of 5 or 6 reviews. Averaging over 100s of reviews is decent. Another thing that you could do, is use resellerratings.com or similar to search for the product to see which sellers give you a good price.

And before I change the topic, some good information. I have heard good opinions by word of mouth and in terms of reviews about B&H. They are on the average a little higher in cost than the cheapest semi-reputable seller you can find.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/

I have heard good things about Adorama.com as well.

If you are looking for Canon EOS lenses to buy, take a look at this link (thank you Deepak for pointing at this). This is a good starting point for a beginner in digital SLR photography and is a beginners guide to lenses for the Canon EOS series –

http://bobatkins.com/photography/digital/10d300dlenses.html

Finally, now that I have broken free of my obsession (for a while) I was trying to think of why I got so convinced into buying this, without doubting the seller and other things. The last time I bought a camera online I was very careful. I have two ideas in this regard and they are a little touchy, but here they are –

What changed since the last time I bought my Sony P150 that caused me not to scrutinize the seller as much? One answer – Google. See people form an emotional bond with their search engine – it is their bringer of information, of right information, of truth. It is not an intellectual bond, it is bond formed out of the force of habit. So when something shows up ‘on top’ on google – I think that that information is credible (for some values of credible). If any of the shoddy sellers above were ranked first or second on Google, that would be true. But, they were sponsored links and they were right on top on Google.

When a link is on top by paying for it, of course its not credible. Of course, Google never does vouch for the credibility of the people who it sells ad space to as well. While all of that is correct, the point is that being on top on Google is a powerful selling force. It can slip past the best of us. The same goes for Google’s Froogle – I don’t think any form of paid advertising is involved there though.

Can Google do something about this? Should they check credibility of the ads they host – I don’t think they can if they want to sell ads in bulk the way they do now. I think this is hard for anyone on top – be it Google or MSN or anyone else. But if they don’t, there will be more like me who trust Google ranking and information finding abilities to magically lend credibility to their sponsored links.

However, here is an opinion – if you plan to be a popular website on which resellers can rely on to sell their goods, then you need to have a credibility system in place. Something like Amazon’s seller feedback and buyer assurance. How much do you think I am going to value sponsored links on Google in the future? Maybe on the whole, advertising on websites would take a big boost, if there was a credibility system.

The second point I wanted to make is one that is best described using Ken Thompson’s ‘Trusting Trust’. How can you trust or mistrust one website based on another? What if the review site you are looking at is faking it? What if someone is trying to make one of the above sites look bad by posting fake reviews? Or is someone trying to make their own site look good?

There is, in my understanding, no way out of this. One almost always ends up implicitly or explicitly trusting one system to make a judgment about another, like KT demonstrated in his Turing award lecture.

http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/

The only thing you can do is mitigate the possibility of being cheated is by looking at several review sites and by calling up your potential sellers. I can’t think of very much else.

Finally, if you are from one of the sort sellers this is what I have to say - get smarter. If I were you and I still wanted to defraud an occasional gullible customer, I would minimally do the following –

- Have more fake reviews in my support

- Sound more endearing on the phone

(despite the bad reviews, a good phone conversation and the price would have got me). You see going on top on google gives you a much larger window of opportunity to get at customers than you realize. Think a little bit – there are many many things you can do. Of course, you will eventually get caught or get sued – but I am assuming you are willing to entail that risk considering some of the reviews I read.

As of now I am not buying my Rebel XT, it a little outside of my budget. But I guess the prices will come down and my budget will go up, in time.