[5] Red Deer, Alberta

So, yesterday my father and I went browsing for my grad gift (I just recently graduated from a B.A.). Our first stop was McBain's camera. The lovely and very helpful Jeremy Ullman, who I suspect is one of the Ullmans of Ullman Photography Ltd. in Red Deer, brought out some bottom end SLR Cameras. He brought out the Canon Digital Rebel 350XT and the Olympus E-500 Evolt. He also said that nothing else really compared to these (at this price range). Jeremy reviewed the benefits of both cameras, and gave a recommendation: Olympus. Of course, I've been crazy about the Digital Rebel for a while, and was rather impressed by the one Melia brought with her to grad. But the more he praised the Olympus, the more I listened, and understood that there was more than just one entry level SLR Camera. So we took his business card, and went to look around at other stores.

The sales person at London Drugs was essentially useless. She didn't know much about SLR Cameras (Jeremy was successfully able to convice my father that non-SLR high end digital cameras (of essentially the same price range, a higher number of megal pixels (instead of 8.0 MP like the Digital Rebel and Evolt, they had 10+), and a lower quality of pictures) were a bad idea since their sensor was so small (as opposed to the SLRs which had decend sized sensors))), and other than that both the Digital Rebel and the Evolt were "high-rated cameras", she only voiced the opinion that it "depended on your preferences and your own experiences". So she convinced us not to buy our camera there (also, same price as McBain).

Next we went to Future Shop, because I wanted to check out a connector for cameras to IPods (in hopes that I could transfer my pictures from device to device to store them while I am in Europe, in case I can't get Zerah's portable harddrive to work). The sales people there were not only totally ignorant, but absolutely useless and unhelpful. There were threr employees in the digital camera sections (none in the MP3 player section), and two of them were "stock boys" who insisted they couldn't help me. The one who "could" was busy. The good thing about going to Future Shop was that we noticed that the Olympus was on sale there, but only until the 8th, so the sale ended at the end of that day. It was 8:45. Future Shop is open until 10 pm, Mc Bain's is open until 9 p.m. So my father phoned Hank (the guy he has known for ages who works at McBain's) and asked if they would match a competitors price and if they took American Express (why he uses AE, I have no idea). They did. And by the time we got to McBain's, the camera was ready to go, the bill was drawn up. The only remaining thing to do was for me to pick a bag and a CF or XD memory card -- which I did.

So the lesson of today's length story (about last night) is this: